Sensing Race Against Representation in the Experimental

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SENSING RACE AGAINST REPRESENTATION IN THE EXPERIMENTAL

WRITINGS OF GERTRUDE STEIN: 1910–1940

Jean L. Neely

A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH)

May 2012

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe much thanks to my entire family and community for supporting me in this work. Thanks to Mike and Joshua Neely for endless grace, love, and unspeakable joy in all the craziness. Thanks to my parents, In Young Lee and Reverend Byung Sun Lee, for their unconditional love and support. Thanks to my sister, Amy Kim, for indispensable sister-love and cherished friendship. Thanks to my grandmother, Sun Ae Lee (for helping to raise us and for my first and only piano, always a source of joy and comfort); to all my grandparents for their loving faith, amazing endurance through colonization and exile, and countless sunrise prayers; all my aunts, uncles, and cousins on both the Lee and

Paik sides of the family for prayers, love and all sorts of support, and especially to

Miyoung Emo—anything but a “little aunt”—for all her creative and spiritual encouragement; and to all the Neely side of the family—Grandmom and Grandpop,

Bonnie, Julie, Pat, Randy, Johnny, Pam, and Jeannie—for taking me into your fold.

I thank David Lloyd for being the best advisor a student could hope for, in particular for all his guidance and help in the thinking through of the aesthetic (and the

Aesthetic), taste (and Taste), representation, race, and poetry within reigning structures of oppression, and for always understanding and drawing out what I might have to say before I’m able to say it. I could not have begun or completed this project without his encouragement, and all my thinking throughout this project is infused with his insight and influence. Thanks to John Carlos Rowe and Pani Norindr for so graciously offering their time, helpful insight, and critique. Thanks to Fred Moten for his friendship, mind-

ii stretching teaching, helpful conversation, all his transformative work and poetry, for getting my project and imparting heartening courage in fighting the good fight. Thanks also to Marjorie Perloff for her teaching in avant-garde poetics, shared enthusiasm for

Stein, and resistant energy at the start of this project, and to Flora Ruiz for her endless helpfulness and patience.

Thanks to my friends and family at Agape Christian Church, Lake Avenue

Church, Shema Church, and InterVarsity ministries. Specifically, I give thanks for all manner of love, support, encouragement, prayers, and ever-heartening friendship to

Michael and Carol Greene, Janet and Yann Schrodi, Jen and Andrew Larratt-Smith, Lynn

Gill, Medalit Tay and Kito Thayne, Mihaela Gilea and Antonio Martinez, Tisla and John

Sideropoulos, Rhea and Henry Sideropoulos, Ariadne Sideropoulos, Christine Kirsch,

Donna Wilson, Wendi Gaines, Susan Mankarious, Alanna and Rick Creighton, Rachel and Peter Calvert, Celia Evenson, Greg and Claudia Walgenbach, Shinobu Yoshida, Julia

Dare, Kristen Irwin, Renee Wherley, Beth Palmer, Susanna Law, Lora Julian, Erin

Wurtemberg, Gloria Brunzell, Grace Yao, Mee Heh Risdon, Megan and Stephen Dove,

Mayra Nolan, Albert Tate, Marion Skeete, Jamie Park, Sandy Chou, Mubarek Abliz,

Anna and Andy Fast, Dayna and Eric Olson-Getty, Anneke Geel, Jennifer Torres

Alcantara, Tiffany and Jay Ehle, Laura and Richard Vachet, Sabina and Waiken Wong,

Becky Stephen, Renée Molitor, and Nathalie Appéré Ralambondrainy. For their encouraging camaraderie in the thick of it at USC, I thank Jennifer Ansley, Amaranth

Borsuk, Michael Cucher, Mary Ann Davis, Mayumo Inoue, Michelle Har Kim, Stacy

Lettman, Sandy Kim, Barbara Mello, Peter O’Neill, Rick Snyder, and Robert Stefanek.

iii For taking the time to read through my drafts, I thank my nephew Patrick Komiske, my sister Amy, and friends Jamie and Shinobu. Extra thanks go to Michelle Har Kim for such invaluable formatting help at the end.

I am also very grateful to the following people in my life: Kelly and everyone at

Charlie’s Coffee House for the wonderful workspace, consistently great coffee and chai, and their uplifting company during the writing of the bulk of this dissertation; my mom, and Thanae Sideropoulos, Amalea Sideropoulos, Anne Tan, Grethel Tan, Medalit Tay, and Kendra Tay for all the babysitting help; Audrey DeVore and Susan Csikesz for their help and encouragement in all things while I was at UC Irvine; Brook Thomas for pushing me to think and write beyond the obvious in my first year of college; Suzanne

Gearhart for her insight and insistent encouragement to continue in literary studies; Mrs.

Elizabeth Park—for the gift of her sister’s book, Dictee; Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, for beautiful work as a Korean American woman with a penchant for French; Laura Doyle for her supportive guidance at the start of my graduate studies at UMass Amherst; Nick

Bromell for a meaningful and memorable introduction to grad studies; Peggy O’Brien for introducing me to Yeats and his world; Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan for gracious and patient guidance in reading theory; and Stacy, Claire and all my Amherst friends.

And all thanks be to God for life and hope in Jesus, for incomprehensible motherly-fatherly care and love, for everyone above and all good things in the midst of the mire, injustice, and untruth all around, up through the highest levels of learning.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ii

Abstract vi

Introduction: Sounding Sense: Reading Race in Steinese 1

Chapter One: Race Invisible, Language Divisible 12

Chapter Two: Representation and the Color Line: 52 Articulations of the Race Age

Chapter Three: The Color of Butter 106

Chapter Four: Race and “The Rhythm of the Visible World” 159

Chapter Five: Butter and Rose 224

Epilogue 268

Bibliography 281

v Abstract

This dissertation undertakes to read, hear, and feel the openly unsaid and concretely sounded, spelled, and sewn manifestations of race and racial anxiety in the writing of Gertrude Stein after 1910. It explores race as the irresistible, elusive, ever- irruptive trace of difference that resists reference and abstractive representational logic while inflecting and shaping the meaning of the ordinary everywhere. In this project I read the frequent explicit references to the racial throughout Stein’s corpus as pivotal, loosely fastening (and fattening) buttons that connect and charge Stein’s recurring vocabularies of the body and domestic space with racial significance. I begin by reviewing the critical climate of discussions of race in Stein’s writing and outlining some of the theoretical work that is instrumental in thinking, locating, and articulating race in relation to Stein and other representation-resistant forms. After some discussion of the historical contexts in which we find race pervasively saturating, infusing, and structuring

Stein’s world of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century life in the U.S. and

France, I consider the ways in which race weaves together and sounds through Stein’s oblique plays on the ordinary, her handling of “little” everyday words and her challenges to the limits of representation. In reading a broad span of Stein’s writings over many years, I look into the intensely intertextually connective and re-sounded, proliferative and profound dynamics of the non-negligible, structuring trace and tracks of race imprinted in and sounded through the familial-ly and materially associative potential of words as relationally suggestive rather than abstractly substitutional, as part of the embodied

vi substance of the Real that constitutes everything though it always exceeds and evades communicative translation and pressures toward graspable, master-able clarity.

vii Introduction Sounding Sense: Reading Race in Steinese

Among the many mold-breaking, iconoclastic, and innovative writers in English in the early twentieth century, Gertrude Stein stands out as one of the most colorful and controversial. Her strong personality and singular writing have over the years incited both the most devoted appreciation from enthusiastic “followers” and disciples of sorts

(especially among avant-garde poets, and feminist, queer, and otherwise institution- challenging readers and writers) and the most dismissive or vilifying criticism.1 In her time, many deemed her “mad,” and she was called a “lunatic,” a “colossal charlatan”

(Rogers 18), and “a literary idiot” (Gold 208).2 It was Stein’s more opaque and disjunctive writing after Three Lives (1909)3 that provoked the most indignant and damning responses from the press and the literary establishment.4 Her noticeably

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 The interesting divergence in opinion regarding Stein’s work and person was something she encountered frequently throughout her lifetime from all sides of the general public, the press, the academics, and other writers. The notoriety of her character and provocative writing style was such that by the time she returned to the U.S. for a lecture tour in 1934 (her first return to the States since having moved to Paris in 1903), she was recognized by nearly everyone she met on the street. Harvey Eagleson commented that Stein’s reputation was “[o]ne of the most curious phenomena of modern literary history” (214) and that “[f]or years her name ha[d] been almost a household word” by the time of her visit to the U.S. (Eagleson, “Gertrude Stein: Method in Madness.” (Sewanee Review, April 1936. Quoted in The Critical Response to Gertrude Stein 214.) 2 Gold was also distinctly perturbed by the bourgeois decadence he saw in Stein’s personally indulgent writing as typical of “the artists of the leisure class” (210). 3 Three Lives itself is stylistically “experimental” in certain ways but relatively more conventionally readable and somewhat familiarly realist. It was also more widely praised and did not incite the kind of critical uproar that ensued from her writing after 1909, which has been more associated with and celebrated by the American “avant-garde” poets and scholars. 4 Jayne Walker has outlined in detail some of the permutations and shifts in style in Stein’s early modernist work from Three Lives on. Around 1910, after some “transitional” (Walker) and increasingly playful writings (including “Two: Gertrude Stein and Her Brother,” A Long Gay Book, and Jenny, Helen, Hannah, Paul and Peter, among others), Stein launched into her arguably most original and poetically influential writings. Stein began to practice a sort of composition in the early 1910s (with her experimental “portraits”

1 different, newer writing was called distinctly “non-literary,” “downright blather of the worst sort” (G.E.K. 27, 28), “literary anarchy,” “unintelligible derangements” (Rogers

18), “tiresome” (E. Wilson 46), “nonsense, a meaningless medley of ill-assorted words,”5

“irritating ceaseless rattle” (Sitwell 26), and “deliberate insanity” (Gold 209), among other names. After 1909, Stein’s markedly increased deviation from norms of communicative clarity into singular modes of word-composition and sound-play opened language up to its material-resonant, intuitively associative, multipliciously meaningful, sensually-oriented fecundity, pushing the limits of representation and highlighting the elusive interplays of sense and nonsense in ways that many found unacceptable and unpalatable.

Early on in her career, Stein marked her coming into her own as a writer and thinker by separating herself from representational norms and the oppressive influences of her brother, Leo, in “Two: Gertrude Stein and Her Brother.” Distancing herself from her brother and dismissing all related masculinist, judgmental, normative, and even other

“Modernist” gazes, Stein boldly announces her departure from the logically linear, the conceptually clear, and the already known or defined:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and Tender Buttons) that noticeably broke from her earlier modes of writing and played in more provocative ways with the limits of representation. Though Three Lives and Making did enact a “new mode of realism” (Walker) in certain ways, with Tender Buttons and the more disjunctive later writings, Stein abandons realist tendencies and even more radically broaches and stretches the limits of representation at the intersections of being and the body. Randa Dubnick notes a distinct break in Stein’s writing around 1912, when, she argues, Stein moved from her “first obscure style” to a distinct “second obscure style” that marked a greater departure “from mimesis of external reality” (28). Though it is impossible to simply categorize Stein’s different styles and modes of anti-mimetic writing, I agree with the point that she began to write in strikingly new ways a around 1910–1912. 5 This comment was made by “Anonymous” in “Gertrude Stein, Plagiary.” New York Evening Sun, June 13, 1914. (Critical Response 16)

2 She smiling yet, she hitting the pin that is sticking and not pricking the skin that is hanging, she likely yet and not forgetting, she hardly yet and not remembering, she and the water trickling, she and with absent breathing, she and with laudation and intoning, she with appetite not returning, she with diminishing attention, she with artificial washing, she with captivating trying on that which is fitting and might not be becoming, she with elucidating self-abnegation, she with entire repudiation, she with anticipating praying, she with augmenting dispersion, she is the one having a connection that expressing is the thing that rising again has risen, and rising is rising and will be having come to be risen. . . . She is the anticipation of forfeiting what is not forbidden. . . . She is the anticipation of crossing. She is the anticipation of regeneration. She is the anticipation of excelling obligation. She is the anticipation. She is the actualisation. . . . She is the convocation of anticipation and acceptation. She is the lamb and the lion. She is the leaven of reverberation. She is the complication of receiving, she is the articulation of forgetting, she is the expression of indication, she is the augmentation of condensing, she is the inroad of releasing. (“Two” 107–108)

Emphatic, repetitive, rhythmically stressed reverberations of the “rising” and “risen”

“She” throughout seem to announce both a new poetics and new ways of being, articulating, and “releasing” through words without and beyond the pressures and gaze of the older brother and other (often male) authorities and critics. Parodically echoing the more abstractly conceptual language of certain (often masculinist and authoritative) communicative and narrative norms, Stein announces her singular pleasure in and appreciation for all the “little words” such as “she,” “with,” “yet,” and “and,”— an appreciation extending to bundles of other repeated words in her noticeably emergent, preferred lexicon (often linked to the body and women’s domestic spaces) such as “pin,”

“in,” “skin,” “but,” “button,” “mutton,” “dish,” “wish,” “kiss,” “tea,” “pot,” “lamp,”

“read,” “red,” “wed,” “wet,” and more. She emphasizes this point later in “Two”:

Saying little words which express a blessing and saying little words which are addressing contemplation and saying little words which can be advancing and saying little words and saying anything is the particle that accentuates the industry of emphasising articulation. (125)

3 In this early piece, Stein underlines the newness of her work as marked by the articulating

“She” and the “anticipation” of the undetermined, the “emphasising” and “articulation” of sounds and marks as constitutive of words in their non-reductive, preconceptual, variedly and intuitively suggestive, beyond-sense relation to and irruptive inroads into sense. I hope to show in the following chapters that Stein’s affectionate celebration of words in personal, concrete, and meaningfully muddy registers is as intimately engaged in an “analytics of raciality” (Silva) (and in the working out of racial anxiety, manifestations of racial privilege, and the related race-inflected pleasures) as it is in the articulation of queer sexuality, convention-defying poetics, and the revaluation of the culinary, feminine, and domestic in ways of being, knowing, and saying.

Coming from the camp of those who enjoy reading Stein’s representationally transgressive poetic writings and who find what is often called her most “difficult” (post-

1910) writing important (rather than meaningless, too self-indulgently “private,” not worth the effort, or unreadably racist), I approach these texts as most illustrative of

Stein’s writerly concerns and potentially instructive on the unexpected locations and largely overlooked matrices of race in modernity and modern representation. It may no longer be true that “most contemporary readers” view Stein as an “unquestionably progressive writer,” as Barbara Will has claimed in her most recent book, but it does still seem to be the case, as Will states, that many who celebrate her “antiauthoritarian, antipatriarchal poetics,” “destabilizing use of language,” and “lesbian-feminist identity” have too often refused to seriously consider the most politically and ethically problematic aspects of her work as in any way significantly related to her poetics or textual-

4 compositional concerns. Perhaps the most troubling elements of her writing in this regard are what I see as the pervasive atmospheric and structural work of race, raciality, and racially hierarchical ontologies throughout her writing. Here I hope to contribute to the beginnings of the critical conversation in this somewhat neglected space, which only few scholars have addressed in depth.

The post-Three Lives writings that I focus on in this dissertation (spanning from the 1910s into the 1940s) and have personally found most enjoyable and profoundly meaningful are characterized by what Peter Quartermain has called a “disjunctive poetics.” Much of this writing is especially “recalcitrant to description, ambiguous, highly wrought, apparently disjointed and even vacant,” full of “multiplicity and uncertainty” and “inexplicableness” (Quartermain 3–4)—and yet also densely suggestive and obliquely productive. Stein’s measured destabilization (not annihilation or total dismissal) of the representational function of words in the more disjunctive writing calls special attention to the interdependence of meaning and material, the loose, unwieldy suggestiveness in the surface, sound, feeling, and rhythmic movement and resonances of words (not cut off from but in constant play with their conventional connotative and denotative meanings). Writings of this sort that span her career across the decades, including Tender Buttons, “Sacred Emily,” “As Fine As Melanctha,” and “Butter Will

Melt,” just to name a few, demonstrate the proliferative, indirectly associative, sense- structuring potential of the racial in texts that are often read as having little or nothing to do with race.

5 In Chapter One, I outline and contextualize the existing scholarship on the question of race in Stein’s work. Although Stein is no longer read as entirely unconcerned with race or as “innocent” with regard to racist attitudes, detailed discussion of the integral textual and compositional workings of race in much of her singular sounding poetic work after around 1910 (marked off noticeably by her new “portrait” work and Tender Buttons writing period between 1910 and 1914) is rare in academically legitimized Stein criticism, which remains largely dominated by white poets and scholars.

Here I hope to situate myself within the still incipient conversation regarding the crucial intersections of race and somewhat opaque, representation-resistant poetics6 in her writing over the decades, especially in her work after the already widely discussed Three

Lives. I also attempt to address some of the conceptual dilemmas surrounding the thinking of race and representation. While the common view of race now as a socio- historical construction (often still linked to biologically determined populations and racial markings) is full of social consequence and significance, and still ever-relevant, in this project I consider the less acknowledged yet eminently consequential locations of the racial in text, context, and the uncontainable other of conceivability and communicative language. I approach race in Stein in terms of the formal workings of the racial as !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 6 I hesitate to use the term “avant-garde” to describe these poetics because of the loaded and conflicted tensions surrounding the term with regard to the profoundly knotted conceptual intersections of the Aesthetic, aesthetics, poetics, revolution, and race, though questions regarding “avant-garde poetics” are not irrelevant here. Stein is often invoked in relation to or by poets associated with the avant-garde, but given how profoundly the fields and definitions of avant-garde poetics (and “avant-garde poets”) in the U.S. are fraught with racial bias and racial tension (in literature departments, poetry studies, and on the “avant-garde” poetry scene), and given the difficulty and density of the nature of the intersection between Stein’s potential “avant-garde” status and the already muddled issue of race in her work, I bracket detailed definitional discussion of the avant-garde for now and hope to address this more fully in future work related to this project. Certain aspects of the often too-easily occluded tensions and difficulties of these aesthetic- poetic-racial problematics have been addressed in the work of Nathaniel Mackey, Fred Moten, Aldon Nielsen, and Timothy Yu.

6 explained primarily in the theoretical work of Denise Ferreira da Silva, Fred Moten, and others who have considered race as preconceptual, profoundly textual, and as real in the often imperceptible and incommunicable realm of extra-sense (Moten’s term), beyond representation and between words, in the very forms of modernity, modern being and liberal democratic, representational subjecthood.

In Chapter Two I review Stein’s immediate and overarching social and historical contexts in order to highlight the inescapable, overdetermined, always in-your-face saturation of race, racial imagery, and racist logic throughout her life and times, in all forms of media, social contexts, and areas of thought, both in the turn-of-the-century U.S. and in her adopted home, early twentieth-century France. I provide some illustrative details regarding the overwhelming racial strains and tones defining her world in order to contextualize the racial slant of Stein’s “ordinary” language and vocabularies (often insistently read in (purportedly “objective”) non-racial or “race-free” terms) and also in hopes of demonstrating the inexhaustible ways in which the very form of modern thought and possibilities of modern cultural, social, scientific, historical, and aesthetic representation turned upon an intrinsically racial logic and discrepant ontology on both sides of the Atlantic. Even as a queer, Jewish, female writer in a heteronormative, male- dominated world, Stein benefited enormously from her ultimate positioning as a white

American (even if in later years she would at times identify the potentially “Oriental” slant of Jewish-ness—for instance, she would never have been obliged to ride in a

“colored” carriage or to identify herself as “colored”—and she everywhere exhibits her own assumption that she was both Jewish-American and essentially white, intrinsically

7 and constitutively different from people who were in effect, pretty unanimously considered non-white in the U.S., especially Asians and Afro-Americans). Indeed, the very structure of her life, including the conditions which enabled her standard of living in

France and all her little daily pleasures, was grounded upon dominant racial hierarchies and imperialist economies.

I begin to address Stein’s texts more directly in the subsequent chapters. Chapter

Three addresses an ever-present element in Stein’s masses of writings over the years: the diversely rich ingredient and substance of “butter.” In my initial attempts to read the significant racial moments in Stein’s work, I couldn’t help but notice the insistent (and openly appreciative) irruptions of “butter” everywhere in numerous writings, and I began to realize some of the ways in which Stein’s recurrent uses of “Chinamen,” “nigger,” and race-related color words across much of her writing are only the most obvious manifestations of race and her racial preoccupations in her work; these epithets and other explicitly race-referential words are very often resoundingly and intricately interactive with “butter” and other oft-repeated “innocent” “little” words connecting many different texts and suggestive associations throughout her corpus. Here, I go over some of the unexpected uses and resonances of “butter” in Stein’s work in passages of individual texts and as significantly inter-textually dynamic. Stein’s handling of butter demonstrates some of the key, less obvious ways in which she sounds and intimates race differently, non-referentially (or through and beyond reference), in the recognizably Steinian, extended repetitions (even over decades of writing) of the familiar words of domestic life, food, and other intimate pleasures. Reading some of the ways in which Stein exploits

8 and spins a word so unassuming yet as densely provocative as “butter” might help us begin to see how race sounds and shows up in textually constructive, integral meaning- amplifying terms throughout her writing, outside of the moments of most direct reference to race.

Tender Buttons, perhaps Stein’s most widely read and appreciated poetic work, and a personal favorite, is the focus of Chapter Four. Though it has been much discussed by critics over the years, I address some of the multiply resonant webs of suggestion and meaning that unconventionally but emphatically announce the importance of the racial in the compositional playfulness of the text and that, as far as I am aware, have yet to be acknowledged. Various critics have noted the jarring “needless are niggers” moment in

“FOOD,” but have not explored how this passage works with and resounds throughout the rest of the text, rather than appearing as an anomalous and inexplicable eruption of racism. Josephine Nock-Hee Park’s recent commentary on the uses of “Japanese” in

Tender Buttons has further opened up discussion of the textual work of race in the piece.

My readings are in a somewhat similar vein but involve a broader look at the entire text with considerations of the many passages in which race sounds and frames meaning inchoately but very suggestively, in such words as “butter” and “red” (heard also in

“butter” as linked with “bread,”) and the less noticed, yet openly announced, possibilities of what is “read.”

The final chapter is an attempt to address this sort of infusion of the racial at work in the constant intertextual relations of Stein’s “little words” and plays on words as proper names. I look in particular at Stein’s recurring “rose/Rose,” which, it turns out,

9 happens to be frequently juxtaposed with “butter.” The word perhaps most recognizably evocative of Stein and her singular style in the well-known line “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” has also been read (and “red”) as everything but related to race. This chapter includes a discussion of various writings of the twenties and Stein’s later piece, The

World is Round. And here again, we find manifestations of race in the realm of the indirectly suggestive, intertextually relating and proliferating sense of sounds spreading across Stein’s corpus in more writing that is not explicitly about race in representational terms. My readings of race in variously related Stein pieces in this chapter attend to the irruptive resonances of race and raciality in and between words and passages whimsically

(and provisionally, or loosely, but perceptibly and arguably) connected through pieces, parts, sounds, and traces of representation in words, phonemes, and letters, and in all the unordered, non-substitutional, appositional, and surprisingly productive workings of word and sound. I also address here some of Stein’s treatment of the Oriental in “Butter

Will Melt,” Everybody’s Autobiography, and in her handling of the names of her

Indochinese servants, “Trac” (where we hear “track” and thus “trace”) and “Lien” (in which we can read the French “lien” and which also happens to be one of the words signifying “lotus” in Vietnamese, and is thus possibly readable as a racializing play on and transformation of “rose”). Ideally, in my later development of this work in progress,

I envisage devoting a separate chapter to Stein’s figuration of the Orient and attitudes toward France and the Indochinese.

My hope in all this is not to judge or presume to correct Stein or adequately revise

Stein criticism but to contribute to the work of those already engaged in making a space

10 for that which is often taken to be nonexistent, or considered a minor, trivial component of Stein’s experimental poetics, partly due to the fact that dealing with race necessarily involves delving into the imprecise, phenomenologically experiential, largely incommunicable, often unperceived or taken-for-granted realm of normality, family- feeling, and open secrets. These pages also constitute a somewhat self-indulgent project, a discussion of work that I have found so enjoyable and troublesome on a personal level.

This project has given me the opportunity to articulate some of my own mostly inchoate pleasure in and personal engagement with mind- and being-expanding writing such as

Stein’s, and my own concerns with the work of the racial in questions of the poetic and the aesthetic. I hope here to partake in ongoing critical conversations with those who are also concerned with how race matters and how it continues to sound in the writing, reading, classification, and canonization of poetry and literature.

11 Chapter One Race Invisible, Language Divisible

My writing is clear as mud, but mud settles and clear streams run on and disappear, perhaps that is the reason but really there is no reason except that the earth is round and that no one knows the limits of the universe that is the whole thing about men and women that is interesting. Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography

Seeing a living human being as an automaton is analogous to seeing one figure as a limiting case or variant of another; the cross-pieces of a window as a swastika, for example. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

Poetry investigates new ways for people to get together and do stuff in the open, in secret.” Fred Moten, B Jenkins

I. A Sense of Sounds

In her little discussed early piece, “Two: Gertrude Stein and Her Brother,” which

Stein wrote between 1910 and 1912,7 Stein identifies her work with the indeterminately suggestive and evocative act of sounding. Overturning the common subjugation of feeling, intuition, material, and body to mind, rationality, and abstracted concepts, Stein insistently distinguishes herself (her creative and intellectual sensibility, her epistemology, and her writing style) from her brother Leo, whom she characterizes as constrictively dependent on concepts, overly cerebral, and censorial. Though the brother !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 7 My dating of Stein’s writing dates are based on the dating of her manuscript notebooks in the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, or at times on the biographical details of her compositional activities in the work of Ulla Dydo, Richard Bridgman, and others.

12 and sister in the text start out similarly, with “sound coming out of them” (1), he ultimately veers toward “ordering,” “explaining,” “understanding” (33), “claiming” (65), and “determining” (96) whereas she “was reflecting what was missing was not destroying that sound sounding is sound sounding” (106) and was rather resisting demands for clarity, aware that “reducing that which is confusing to that which is so clear. . . . is not the only meaning of pleasing” (119). Stein’s early insights on the ways she differed from her brother and attended to the “pleasing” capacities of language and sound—which for her became inextricable from “expressing receiving, mingling, loving” (48), “feeling”

(52), “tendering” (75), and “struggling,” (86)—tellingly reflect her creative handling of language throughout her writing career. “Two” is full of self-celebratory musings on

Stein’s writing that meaningfully articulate the importance throughout her work of

“intoning” through words and sounds (107), through multi-relational, self-othering, paradoxical, and rupturing spaces in, between, and beyond sense and sound. Stein’s poetic work does not fetishize opacity for the sake of being merely and utterly confounding but rather explores and celebrates the hinterland of language and thought, calling attention to the concrete limits of representation and the opacities and obliquities of the everyday while also using the familiar denotative and connotative relating- and suggesting-capacities of words.8

When Stein first launched into her most deviant modes of writing, around 1910, where she departed drastically from recognizable realist, referential, and mimetic modes !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 8 Many serious readers of Stein have recognized and appreciate this aspect of her singular textual work— the dwelling in between sense and nonsense, and the redemption of the sensual, bodily, curved, and preconceptual, or non-conceptual. Harriet Chessman has commented on this aspect of Stein’s writing as an appreciation for the “presymbolic.”

13 of expression, she caused an uproar in the literary community and press. Outraged responses to her writing made clear the firmly entrenched expectations and demands of the public and the literary establishment for communicative clarity. One contemporary critic, Henry Seidel Canby, characterized Stein’s style as “primitive” and claimed that she obviously did not know poetry from shite:

. . . words, whatever else they do and there is a great deal else they do, must make sense. If they do not make sense they are no longer being used as words. Dung is as beautiful a word as the couplet ding-dong, but it cannot be used for sheer beauty of sound as long as it means dung which is not beautiful. Or rather it can be made beautiful only by lifting dung to beauty, which is not what Miss Stein tries to do at all. . . . She plays with her words, pretending they are not words. . . . you have to be a little childish to pretend that they say something when it is quite evident that they do not. Or to listen to them as sounds merely when it is evident that they continue to mean what mankind has assigned to them. . . . Anyone with a good ear (not a common possession, and Miss Stein’s is excellent) can make enchanting successions of sounds if they do not bother with sense. The difficult thing is to make sense, which is precisely what all great stylists have accomplished.

No, this book is not by any definition literature. It is music of a primitive and rather fascinating kind, vitiated by the drag of meaning. (Canby 81)

Interestingly, Canby condemned Stein for writing practices that set her poetry apart from that of many of her contemporaries in singularly innovative material-sensitive and meaningful ways. His article recognizes her marked appreciation for and privileging of sounds as sounds while missing the fact that though her writing is far from conventionally readable or clear, it in fact does “continue to mean” in subtle, playful, indeterminate, and often surprising ways.9

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 9 Stein herself acknowledged in “A Transatlantic Interview” that she never intended to separate words completely from sense, and that it was impossible in any case to do so, given the inherent nature of the word’s linking to sense. She notes her attention to the “weight and volume” and material quality of words while also asserting that it is “impossible to put them together without sense.” (HWW 18)

14 The best of Stein’s writing sounds sense in delightful ways that counter the reductive and instrumental forces of conceptual language and dominant representational regimes. With regard to her more poetically playful work of this kind that she came out with after 1910, starting with her early unconventional “portraits” and Tender Buttons, even those who claimed that she might be a “hoaxtress,” and the epitome of “chaotic imbecility,” at times conceded that Stein had “provided the world with a new kind of entertainment” and had “given. . . . a new kind of sensation” to her readers

(Kreymborg170).10 The enthusiastic few—who found her work “full and gay and queer and unexpected all along,”11 “rich in. . . . a sense of humor,”12 “perpetually alive and stimulating,” and possessing “sensuous charm,”13 —called her “a pathbreaker, a revolutionary” (Winter 83, 86), and all this is, I believe, relevant to her continuing importance in American literature and avant-garde poetics.14 Though by no means easily

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 10 Alfred Kreymborg: “Gertrude Stein—Hoax and Hoaxtress: A Study of the Woman Whose ‘Tender Buttons’ Has Furnished New York with a New Kind of Amusement.” The New York Morning Telegraph, March 7, 1915. (The Critical Response to Gertrude Stein 170). Offering another mixed critical review of Stein, Edith Sitwell claimed that the book Geography and Plays appeared “to be a collection of heterogeneous words, thrown together without any respect for meaning, but only a respect for the shape and rhythm of sentences” but that she [Sitwell] and other readers of course preferred words “to convey some sense” (25). In the same article, however, Sitwell also found “delicious Picasso-like landscape” and “great bravery, a certain real originality, and a few flashes of exquisite beauty” (26). (Sitwell would, as is well known, later become an avid Stein promoter ands arranged for her first lectures in Cambridge and Oxford.) (Critical Response) 11 Bernard Fay, notorious for his Nazi affiliations, wrote this in his tribute “A Rose is a Rose,” The Saturday Review of Literature, September 2, 1933. (Critical Response 63) 12 Found in Carl Van Vechten’s review on Geography and Plays, “Medals for Miss Stein.” The New York Tribune, May 13, 1923. (Critical Response 24). 13 Carl Van Vechten “How to Read Gertrude Stein.” Trend August 1914. (Critical Response 158). 14 Showing some insight on enjoying Stein’s writing, Ella Winter comments that Stein is a “perpetually alive and stimulating writer whether you ‘understand’ the meaning of the sentences she writes or whether you do not. . . . She wonders in rhythm and in cadences and she rouses wonder in you and she never answers your wonders because that would end it. . . . she broke new paths She challenged the traditional ways of writing and using punctuation and nouns and adjectives and adverbs. She was intensely alive to new combinations of word and phrases and sentences.” “Gertrude Stein Comma.” Pacific Weekly, April

15 describable or uniform, Stein’s innovative way with words is perhaps most succinctly and memorably summed up in Mina Loy’s tribute: “Curie/ of the laboratory/ of vocabulary/ she crushed/ the tonnage/ of consciousness/ congealed to phrases/ to extract/ a radium of the word.” Loy also characterized Stein’s writing as a “process of disintegration and reintegration, this intercepted cinema of suggestion” capable of provocatively stirring readers.15 In later assessments of her work, increased emphasis on the particularly radical and liberatory aspects of her writing has contributed to Stein’s now canonical status, especially, and understandably, among feminist and queer readers of modernism and the poetic avant-garde, and more recently as a part of American “minority” writing.16 Many literary folk have now come to consider her a bold “experimenter with words and sentences,” as Louis Bromfield once called her.17

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 12, 1935. (Critical Response 83-84) Winter’s views echo the earlier praises of Mabel Dodge (later Dodge Luhan) in 1913. Dodge wrote: “In Gertrude Stein’s writing every word lives and, apart from the concept, it is so exquisitely rhythmical and cadenced, that when read aloud and received as pure sound, it is like a kind of sensuous music.” She goes on to say that Stein’s work marks a productive “birth” in English writing: “Many roads are being broken—what a wonderful word—“broken”! And out of the shattering and petrification of today. . . . we will see order emerging tomorrow. Is it so difficult to remember that life at birth is always painful and rarely lovely? How strange it is to think that the rough-hewn trail of today will become tomorrow the path of least resistance, over which the average will drift with all the ease and serenity of custom. All the labor of evolution is condensed into this one fact, of the vitality of the individual making way for the many” (154). 15 This comment is from Mina Loy “Communications: Gertrude Stein.” to the Editor of The Transatlantic Review, 1923. (Critical Response 182) 16 Though arguably benefiting from privileged standing as an effectively “white,” upper middle-class, non- laboring “lady,” Stein still of course lived the marginalizing effects linked to being a female, lesbian, Jewish writer in a predominantly white male, often anti-Semitic Anglo-American literary world. I will discuss her both complicated and matter-of-fact identification with Jewishness later, but experientially at least, the fact that she was subject to anti-Semitic prejudice (especially as a Californian, non-New England Jewish female student in Cambridge and Baltimore, but also throughout her life) is clear. In reviewing her work, both the non-Jewish and Jewish press also commonly identified her as a “Jewess” or as a writer of “Jewish origin” (as in Blanche London’s article “Gertrude Stein,” in The New Palestine, April 5, 1929 (The Critical Response to Gertrude Stein 192). 17 Louis Bromfield “Gertrude Stein, Experimenter with Words.” The New York Herald-Tribune Books, September 3, 1933. (Critical Response 66)

16 In the midst of all the lively discussions surrounding Stein and her writing, considerations of the importance of race in her work have been relegated to a somewhat delimited critical space.18 Following Sonia Saldívar-Hull’s well-known denunciation of

Stein’s racism in 1989,19 Michael North, in The Dialect of Modernism (1994), discussed

Stein’s participation in modernist writers’ strategic and formal dependence on racializing dialects and notions of the primitive. Specifically, North’s study focuses on Stein’s early fictional piece, “Melanctha,” and her exploitation of “dialect” as related to Picasso’s primitivism and uses of African masks, and as part of a broader trend in which modernist writers (such as Conrad, Pound, and Eliot) employed racializing strategies and deviant language to buttress their own white and creative-authorial status. In ways consistent with North’s situating of Stein within such modernist trends, Laura Doyle’s article, “The

Flat, the Round, and Gertrude Stein: Race and the Shape of Modern(ist) History” (2000) which focuses on Stein’s early narrative fiction, also points out that Stein’s and “the modernists’ racializing of language, characters, and plots is of a piece with, rather than an unfortunate diversion from, their literary innovations” (256).20 Other scholars who have

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 18 Most recently (too recently for careful consideration during the writing of these chapters), in two new 2011 books, critics Barbara Will and Annalisa Zox-Weaver have examined her disturbing political affiliations, fascist sympathies, and ties to the Nazi-collaborating Vichy government in occupied France. Their studies of Stein’s World War II and post-war activities and political statements will no doubt contribute to elucidating the complex inter-workings of politics and aesthetics in Stein’s modernist sensibility and problematic authorial and national-cultural self-construction. From what I know, they look more at her direct political statements and interactions with fascist authorities and do not specifically address her conceptualization of race as it is manifest in the textual workings of the racial in her poetics. 19 Sonia Saldívar-Hull called attention to the problematic nature of her celebrated status among feminists given the overt racist strains in work such as Three Lives. 20 In her article, Doyle underscores the fact that readings of only some isolated writings by Stein as individually racist “only obscures the ways race is more inherent to her fiction and to Western narrative as a whole” and that though “Stein both critiques and colludes in the racial order of things,” the inevitable “racist resonance” of race-elements in her work primarily “accru[e] power to the white author/reader”

17 addressed race in Stein’s writing and contributed to the opening up of considerations of race in modernist aesthetics and Stein criticism include Priscilla Wald, Lorna Smedman,

Lynn Weiss, Shawn Alfrey, Aldon Nielsen, Harryette Mullen, and more recently, Yetta

Howard and Josephine Nock-Hee Park.21

Despite these important beginnings to more open discussion of race in Stein’s corpus, many Stein scholars have often proceeded according to the assumption that

Gertrude Stein was little, if at all, concerned with questions of race, and that for the most part her (often-called) “experimental” writings have little, if anything, to do with race.

Most Stein criticism assumes that her textually experimental engagement with race is limited to, or most significantly exhibited in, her early publication, Three Lives

(“Melanctha” in particular) and perhaps also in The Making of Americans.22 In various

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (268). In her earlier book, Bordering on the Body (of the same year as North’s 1994 volume), Laura Doyle also addressed the centrality of race in modernism through her attention to modern fiction’s crucial “racial matrix,” modernism’s grounding in “mother figures” who “give birth to racial plots” (4) and in racial- structures articulated through the maternal. In a broad range of fiction readings, Doyle’s book elucidates modernism’s grounding in the racial-reproductive, boundary-maintaining roles of mothers as they are circulated within reigning “racial patriarchies” that “sort bodies not only according to racial hierarchies but also according to a metaphysical dichotomy between mind and body,” where the maternal is always “aligned with the body” (6), all of which is relevant in the reading of Stein. 21 (This is not an exhaustive list.) While I appreciate these critics’ attempts to address race in Stein’s work (especially Smedman’s broaching of the issue of race in a less conventionally readable piece, “White Wines”), I find the readings of Wald, Smedman, and Weiss somewhat problematic and disagree with some of their approaches to (and many of their conclusions regarding) the significance and location of race in Stein’s writing. 22 The “Melanctha” portion of Three Lives, in particular, is clearly fraught with issues of racial drama, projection, verbal experimentation, vernacular approximation, the racialization of transgressive sexualities, and especially the common pathologization of black women’s sexuality in the U.S. Despite its popular impact in literary circles of the time as stylistically groundbreaking and racially humanizing, and despite ongoing critical discussions and issues with regard to this early writing, my interests in Stein’s work lie primarily beyond and beside this piece, which I personally find among her most racist and least interesting. In addition to and as a part of all the other literarily significant and otherwise multiply signifying gestures taking place in Three Lives, I also cannot help but always hear the echo throughout this text of Stein’s characterization of the compilation, which if disingenuous is still telling, as a minor detour in her attempt to write through the problem of what she felt was her grand project, The Making of Americans. As Priscilla Wald and others have noted, Stein wrote of her ambitions and frustrations in the writing of Making in a

18 studies emphasizing Stein’s Jewish identifications and minority position, the misleading implication seems to be that identifying or sympathizing with certain oppressed groups

(Jewish, queer, female) would necessarily preclude or be irreconcilable with racist attitudes and practices on her part, and even imply a necessarily “progressive” attitude with regard to race. But as we see throughout history and all over literature, that is obviously not the case—as so often, the agendas of many “minority”-affiliated and limitedly “progressive” groups rely on, strategically occlude, and perpetuate racially exclusionary practices and regimes, often claiming entirely adequate identificatory comprehension and representation of differently oppressed and distinctly racialized groups or even using their own histories of oppression to justify racist and destructive

(framed as “defensive”) acts.) Much of the criticism that has (in some ways legitimately) read and celebrated Stein as a feminist, queer, “minority” writer seems to problematically imply that Stein’s potential identification with certain “minority” groups amounts to evidence that she was innocent of any racialist, racist, or exclusionary attitudes and practices.23 Such reasoning deflects attention from the many ways in which the limitedly

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! letter to her friend, Mabel Weeks, confessing: “I am afraid that I can never write the Great American novel . . . . so I have to content myself with niggers and servant girls and the foreign population generally” (Quoted in Wald 239). Despite the highly charged implications of this early work, the frequent references to racial minorities and uses of racial epithets scattered generously throughout Stein’s corpus of writings have often been dismissed as anomalous awkward moments, or critiqued as instances which may betray authorial racism but which do not carry much textual or thematic significance. I disagree with Lynn Weiss’s claims that the popularity of “Melanctha” among some black writers of the period(such as Richard Wright), Stein’s inclusion of “Negroes” in later writings, and her friendliness toward Wright and other Afro-Americans demonstrate any conscientious sensitivity to the dynamics of race or constitute proof of non-exclusionary, non-racializing (or racist) attitudes. 23 Wald and Smedman for instance, while recognizing problematic racist moments in Stein’s writing, seem ultimately compelled to bracket such moments from her general position and practices as a writer. Wald, for instance, ultimately celebrates her work and status as importantly speaking out for underrepresented American voices (Wald). And Smedman seems compelled to attribute only progressively deconstructive intentions to Stein, such that any racializing or racist resonances in Stein’s text are characterized as

19 liberatory agendas of the (white) feminist movement and erstwhile marginalized, belatedly white “ethnic” populations (including Irish-Americans, Jewish-Americans, and other Southern- and Eastern-European groups) strategically participated in and often continue to benefit from the racial denigration of “darker” peoples and continents.

With some exceptions, the critics mentioned above and others addressing the function of race in Stein’s writing have for the most part limited their discussion to her use of dialect or racial references, especially in her earliest fictional writings between

1904 and 1909 (as Doyle and North have), or in the more explicit pronouncements on race scattered throughout her (relatively) more referentially direct (though by no means conventional or monologic) autobiographical, expository, and narrative work of the later decades (1930s–40s). These more explicit expressions of Stein’s racial attitudes are significant in helping us to contextualize her varied writing strategies and her corpus as a whole over the decades; but far from being minor elements of otherwise mostly “race- free,” race-blind, or racially neutral experimental writing, they are rather part of far- reaching race-textual dynamics constantly at work in Stein’s broader word-compositional uses of language. What interests me most in Stein’s writing is the more textually playful, openly evasive, ever-present work of race through, beside, and beyond these more direct

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! necessarily sticking to the language entirely apart from and despite Stein’s compositional strategies or textual plays. (In her article, “A Cousin to Cooning,” Smedman discusses the occurrence of the racially loaded (if not racist) occurrence of “cooning” in Stein’s short play White Wines. (After discussing possible non-conventional inflections of the word and the textual/interpretative significance of Stein’s overarching attempts to make words perform in new and non-representational ways, Smedman concludes that such instances demonstrate Stein’s “failure to render such loaded signifiers harmless” given their embeddedness in racist history and acts). I will discuss Smedman’s article further in chapter 5.) Lynn Weiss seems to misread the workings of race, racial power, and the racial in general in her Stein criticism. She repeatedly emphasizes Stein’s inclusion of Afro-Americans in her work and her apparent friendliness with and affection for certain black Americans as proof of her being free from racist and racializing views, and even as proof of distinctly racially progressive attitudes.

20 evocations of race and dialect—the race-reliant, appositionally oriented meaning-making in the writing that is arguably her most “full and gay and queer and unexpected.”

In this study of Stein’s work, I read across various multi- and cross-genre texts from all over her corpus as they are woven together by vast webs of association and recurring lexicons, sounds, and morphemes that effuse and sound out pervasive racial anxieties and underlying racially hierarchical structures in the midst of much of Stein’s textually playful and representation-resistant writing. I explore the ways in which Stein’s implicit authorial (often imperial) assumptions and strategies, insistent sounding of recurring pet-words, and endless permutations of familiar lexical sets (often composed of words closely tied to the body, the sexual, and to traditional women’s spaces—all of which is implicated in articulations of the racial) are pervasively in play with her racial climate and the more recognized, referentially-functioning race-related texts and moments in her writing while also sounding and locating race in both the grounding possibility and the elusive outskirts of representation. In the connective interstitial spaces between Stein’s words and massive collection of writing (especially the texts that most celebrate and tease out the inextricable co-habitations of spirit and body, of meaning and material, sense and nonsense), we see, hear, and feel (perhaps even taste) race figured as that which is both most concretely visible (and most simply referential) and that which insistently evades representation.

In looking at the ways Stein’s culinary-sensual, intimate-domestic sounds, vocabularies, and grammars interact within and between texts, I have found that though it is often dissociated from the texts and passages that are more denotatively and

21 referentially race-relating, the body-, food-, Alice-, and home-loving “Steinese” that emerges in relief from her corpus emanates and sounds race everywhere. Stein’s richly charged lexicons and lateral sound associations throughout numerous writings over the years manifest race as an integral part of her (loosely and vastly) connective textu(r)al fabric and insistently re-sound the racial structure and race-obsession that reverberate most noticeably out of the explicit references to race in her work. Rather than being textually trivial, anomalous, or excisable elements of Stein’s body of writing, the more explicit race-references act as crucial (though tentative and mutable) epicenters or fastening nodal points of sorts (—Lacan’s notion of structural points de capiton may be useful here),24 in many ways structuring and enlivening the ordinary everyday language that ostensibly has nothing to do with race.

II. Critical Color Lines

The Stein pieces that most sustain my attention seem to be among those that tend to intersect most with twentieth-century avant-garde writing and that have most engaged poets and critics of the “avant-garde” but that have received less attention from scholars discussing issues of race in her work. Reading across Stein studies, it becomes noticeable that scholars who have directly addressed questions of race in Stein have tended to focus on her (relatively) less recalcitrant and “experimental” writings (such as Three Lives or !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 24 See Lacan’s “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire.” These points in Stein’s writing do not necessarily precisely follow the sorts of functions Lacan assigns to the points de capiton, but in terms of loose similarity, Lacan’s notion of certain points that interact dynamically and meaningfully with the signifying capacities of other elements in a text or structure is not entirely irrelevant here.

22 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas) where race appears in more conventional referentially-oriented statements or in overt blackface dialect and “ventriloquism.” Most of the other scholars and poets who are primarily interested in the avant-garde poetics of the more oblique texts and who have contributed to elucidating some of the textual workings of pieces characterized by Stein’s most “experimental” or “opaque style” of writing (Ruddick 147), have avoided looking closely at the racial slant in and across the kinds of Stein texts that they have addressed in detail.

A few critics concerned with dismantling the segregation of race-issues and questions of avant-garde poetics in Stein’s work, including Aldon Nielsen and Josephine

Nock-Hee Park, have taken steps in initiating critical discussions of race in her poetic writing.25 In her recent article on Stein’s “Orients,” Park calls attention to the race- resonant implications of moments in Tender Buttons, “Susie Asado” and Four Saints in

Three Acts. In their creative writing, poet Harryette Mullen and novelist Monique

Truong have also alluded to the deeply racialist underpinnings of Stein’s poetics by highlighting ways in which race and racialist attitudes saturated and structured all of

Stein’s language, figurations of femininity and sexuality, as well as her textual and domestic pleasures. Deborah Mix and Elizabeth Frost have discussed some of the important revisionist work in Harryette Mullen’s poetry, especially in Trimmings, which

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 25 Timothy Yu, in his relatively recent Race and the Avant-Garde, also addresses the issue of race in the definition of avant-garde poetics. He includes Stein in his grouping of major white-avant-garde poets of the twentieth century, especially in relation to the emergence of “Language poetry” (14), but I believe he does not discuss Stein’s writing or use of race in depth.

23 is notably influenced by and pointedly responds to Tender Buttons.26 These critics and writers have opened up critical space for the discussion of race in experimental poetry and Stein’s poetic writing in particular. With the exception of Park’s commentary, however, most of this critical work addresses and involves Stein’s posthumous influence on later writers and avant-gardist, racially revisionist responses to her work. There has not been much close consideration of how race works in, structures, and ties together

Stein’s writings themselves.

Sharing in some of the spirit and concerns of writers such as Park, Mullen, and

Nielsen, I attempt to address the (as far as I can tell) yet un-discussed, knotted, and muddy terrain of how race is critically involved in the textually interconnective proliferation and structuring of meaning and suggestive feeling in Stein’s work across many texts and years, through the insistent workings and “tender” “caressing” and

“refusing” of the rich, everyday “bread and butter,” “button” and “lace” (or butter-and- race) elements of a recurrent, recognizably Steinian lexicon. In some ways, my interest in Stein and ways of reading her seem to resonate with the critical sensibility of the Stein enthusiasts who have looked most closely and lovingly at large chunks of her corpus in terms of more playfully poetic than narrative considerations, but who generally do not discuss race. In my attempts to read Stein broadly and deeply, for instance, I approach !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 26 I will address commentary by Mix (in “Tender Revisions”), Smedman (on “cousin to cooning”), and Park’s contributions further in subsequent chapters. Briefly here, Mix notes Mullen’s impression of Stein as very racially-inflected and delimited, though she is often celebrated innovatively feminist or queer in “universal” or race-neutral terms. Taking seriously Mullen’s assessment of Stein’s “pink and white femininity,” Mix addresses the racializations in Tender Buttons, noting as well the criticisms of Nielsen and Saldivar-Hull, and in interpreting parts of Tender Buttons, seems to conclude, with Lorna Smedman, that Stein was perhaps simply misled in her attempts to “’romanticize’ racial difference out of misplaced condescending sympathy” and unable to dislodge the racist power of “frozen linguistic formulations” in American speech.

24 Stein’s work with an affection of the kind that is apparent in much of Ulla Dydo’s careful attention to her writing across the decades, for instance. I have found in my own readings of Stein that a sense of the extent and depth of the significance of race in her writing emerges most noticeably when one considers broad swaths of her writing together and attends (as much as possible) to the profound intertextual dynamics of her entire corpus, in ways that Dydo and other persistent Stein specialists have done. (One has to be smitten and charmed enough to consider the impossible and laborious undertaking worthwhile.)

In Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises, Dydo looks closely at many of

Stein’s writings from 1923 through 1934, showing how much her writing remained grounded in “immediate daily life—people, places, events, observations, letters” and demonstrating the familiarly Steinian yet otherwise unconventionally associative, appositional ways all manner of possible threads of meaning arise in her use of language.

Dydo’s contribution to Stein studies is considerable, and despite her silence on the racial in Stein’s writing, her otherwise careful, caring, and holistic methods of approaching and reading Stein’s work actually engage in the kinds of textual and readerly processes that show in relief the prevalent yet oblique workings of race in Stein’s writing. It is useful to keep in mind while reading Stein, for instance, as Dydo points out, that though Stein was supremely concerned with her writing as literary and compositional, she was also wholly personally involved with it. As few, if any, other Stein critics have noted, Dydo also makes a point that I find essential for serious examinations of Stein’s writing—that to look at any particular Stein text in isolation from the rest of her corpus is to take it out of

25 highly relevant and textually, interpretively dynamic context (5). I share Dydo’s view that, while each text is enjoyable and meaningful on its own (and even in pieces), Stein’s writings are perhaps most rewarding and productive when approached “as a single spiritual autobiography whose vocabulary is generated by the daily life” (Dydo 7)— though I would say rather a spiritual-sensual, sense-beyond-sense autobiography of sorts.

Broader familiarity with Stein’s writing allows a reader to pick up on significant intertextual valences in her work: insistently recurring words, tendencies, and loosely sewn textual threads, or as Dydo puts it, “the steadily emerging intricate patterns and figurations which can be read in innumerable ways” (10), across numerous texts.27

Dydo’s approaches to Stein’s compositions are, I believe, among the more useful and relevant for reading Stein, and a bit more in the spirit of her writing than other readings of

Stein texts primarily as discrete units.

While Dydo’s studies demonstrate numerous ways in which Stein’s writings and words emerge into “patterns of meaning,” that they “always tease us to try again” and yield “new possibilities” with every reading (237), she also takes part in a critical tendency (among the broadly-reading, poetics-attentive Stein enthusiasts) to follow the playful processes of textually (and biographically) generated meaning-suggestiveness

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 27 Dydo is also right to point out that Stein’s writing is challenging and unconventional but not particularly “concealing” (as is evident in the “abundantly clear” though non referential “sexual material” throughout) (18), and that Stein renovated and spun words differently, sometimes breaking them down into syllables and sounds, or compounding them, often punning and playing trans-lingually, evoking indeterminate and whimsical meanings and turns of words without destroying sense on the one hand or submitting to rigid referential norms on the other. Dydo recognizes both that autobiographical components are integral to Stein’s texts and that such details do not “explain her work” (6) in any straightforward manner. As she puts it, and as the writings attest, the texts “ are not ‘about’ Stein’s life and are not autobiographical in design,” but they also thoroughly “absorb the vocabulary of her experience” (83). Stein’s writings are filled with the air, atmosphere, climate (as she might say), words, sounds, rhythms, feelings, and flavors of her world.

26 only up to the point of engaging with the racial in the text. In her comments on the difficult piece, “An Elucidation” (1923), for instance, Dydo notices intimations of

“placement and order,” in the mention of “the white and the black squares” of a checkerboard and the lines: “I know the difference between white marble and black marble. White and black marble make a checkerboard and I never mention either”

(quoted on Dydo 67). Dydo notes that these lines echo the checkerboard imagery in

“Next. Life And Letters of Marcel Duchamp” (1920), which “also speaks of ‘dark people’” (Dydo 67); and she mentions that “An Elucidation” in turn also contains the line, “Brown and white. The nigger and the night” (67). Without the slightest commentary on the appearance of “nigger” here or the racial overtones of all these passages and both texts considered together, Dydo simply goes on to remark that

“checkerboard patterns were also prominent for years in the work of Juan Gris, which

Stein followed closely,” that it would be “futile to look for a source for her checkerboard,” but that such “figures and themes” and “geometric patterns” are

“prominent in ‘An Elucidation’” and recur elsewhere in Stein’s writing (68). Notably, there is no consideration of possible allusions to or concern with a racial order (or the possible reflection here of Stein’s hyper-awareness of color lines and potential hint that she deals with and innovatively intimates her racial preoccupations everywhere while also seeming to “never mention” them). Later in her book, in her discussion of Stein’s

Four Saints, Dydo comments on Stein’s apparent “indifference to ‘killing five thousand chinamen’” merely as an example of “how Stein draws on what daily life offers her”

(given that the line related back to a conversation Stein had had with someone), as just

27 one of many biographical “details” that “make for verbal and theatrical variety and fun” in Stein’s work (200, 201).

In Writing Between the Lines and elsewhere in his work, Aldon Nielsen discusses such problematic (ultimately segregational) tendencies in literary studies of avant-garde poetics in particular and makes the crucial point that apparent race-blindness in white poetry and criticism (a penchant we see in Dydo’s work above) does not constitute an actual absence of race (in the area or poetry in question) or race-neutrality but rather belies thoroughly racially charged dynamics and ongoing racial hierarchies in dominant literary regimes. Though he has not commented in great detail on Stein’s writings after

Three Lives (as far as I am aware),28 Nielsen’s discussions of the textual importance of race in the writings of the white avant-garde and modernist poets (among whom he includes Stein) point out the underlying racial framework and representational dynamics at stake in Stein’s and other writers’ inevitably already racialized (even if non-referential)

“white language” (1988: 23). Through the subtler, less tangibly identifiable structures of racism and indirectly race-imbued language (most unmistakably felt by non-white readers and academics—who are often accused of (or patronizingly treated as if they are) imagining and overstating race matters), Nielsen explains, race and racial hierarchies are active everywhere even (and most effectively) in writing that does not apparently refer to race or use overtly racializing/racist language.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 28 Nielsen mentions the most overtly in-your-face racist moments in Stein’s work, from “Melanctha” and Tender Buttons for instance, in his Reading Race: White American Poets and the Racial Discourse in the Twentieth Century (21-28). He has also discussed in more detail the work of poets influenced by Stein and the general need to consider race issues in Stein’s writing and the white avant-garde.

28 Nielsen’s observations on the foundational, often unconsciously structuring

“language of race” apply well not only to the thick atmosphere of race throughout Stein’s writing but also to the dynamics of institutionally established Stein studies. Nielsen calls attention to the workings of race (as trace) and the pervasive racial power structures at work in enduring racialized perspectives in avant-garde poetry and elsewhere.29

Especially relevant here are some of Amiri Baraka’s comments on language, ideology, and non-official being, which Nielsen alludes to in his title and introduction to Reading

Race in American Poetry: “An Area of Act.” Nielsen quotes Baraka’s statement on realities that tend to be unperceivable, ignored, and denied by a white majority often unconscious of its privilege and participation in repressive systems: “HELL any positivist can tell you ‘does not exist.’ There is no such place. But I feel there is an area of act that is hell. . . . A place of naming” (Nielsen 2000: 1; quoted from Baraka “Names and

Bodies”). Baraka’s incisive statement points out the undeniable, though mostly unverifiable, locations and manifestations of race and racism that evade positivist

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 29 In Writing Between the Lines, commenting on the white evasion of the structural, representational, and perspectival locations of race, Nielsen writes: . . . .in America, the language of race allows white people to evade responsibility for the assumptions by which they live. It allows them to cling to an American innocence of primal oppressions. Because of the language of race, white people can believe that so long as they aren’t individually and directly engaged in the physical suppression of black people, they are free of the signifying effects of racism. With the language of race, white people tell each other that the terms of their discourse are descriptions of essential cultural traits, that cultural traits are freely assumed, but that they essentially coincide with skin color. . . . Such a formulation, by displacing attention from the consequences of history to a presumed repertoire of freely assumed cultural traits, permits white people to think of themselves as untainted by racism at the same moment in which they think of black people as a class that is morally and socially inferior. (13-14) In addition to pointing out common blindspots (or ethical evasions) on the part of a dominant white literary academy, Nielsen’s discussion of race in avant-garde writing also sheds light on the persistently ongoing misrecognition and misconstrual of race in avant-garde poetics and texts. His characterization of white avant-garde studies is pertinent to the tendencies to occlude, ignore, or misread race in Stein’s work.

29 definitions.30 Here it is important to consider the implicit power and acts of “naming” at work in moments well before and beyond the explicit social and referential race- categorizing, race-naming, and name-calling in particular languages.31 The potentially hellish “area of act” in question involves the “place” or reality that many can arguably claim “does not exist”—not the most overt and vulgar racism or racial violence that most people are quick to identify and denounce as inhumane and racist, but that which persists largely undisturbed precisely because it exists in the traces and structures of all modern representational regimes,32 distributions of power, reigning ontological and aesthetic assumptions, and unquantifiable, incommunicable (and thus easily dismissible) phenomenological experience—that is, the places in which white privilege and power are most insidiously at work and easiest to deny, where purported weakness, fault, pathology, lack of intelligence, and paranoid misperception are most effectively attributed to the racial other.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 30 As Slavoj !i"ek has commented and other critical theorists have noted, the workings of ideology (racial ideologies included) are not primarily apparent and effective in a person’s professed views (as multiculturally progressive or whatnot), but rather in the less communicable and more telling “area of act.” 31 In addition to direct “naming,” other differently referential, implicit, indirect, grammatical, power- exercising functions of language and representational systems (and the way in which such systems infuse and inflect all representational and political power structures) are relevant here. We might also recall here Hortense Spillers’ all too true comment on the workings of race and power intrinsic to “American grammar”: “sticks and bricks might break our bones, but words will most certainly words kill us” (209). Toni Morrison and others have also commented on the racial grammar intrinsic to American life and literature as structurally problematic. And Rachel DuPlessis, in her discussion of white American modernists, also articulates the unequal, imperial structures of race that continue to ground whiteness and white literature. As she states, “Blacks have often been [and are still] used by whites as an image of the unconscious of whites—fecund, productive, creative, but, as it were, in a colonial relation, the raw material of blackness fueling poetic production in the metropole of whiteness” (48). 32 As I will discuss further below, Denise Ferreira da Silva explains race as involved in the globally engulfing nature of the ontoepistemological problem at work in all modern representation.

30 Though Nielsen and Baraka focus on the white and black of race, as Robert Lee,

Colleen Lye, Edward Said, and many others have demonstrated, the Orient (in its various forms, whether Middle Eastern or Far Eastern), the Oriental, the “Chinaman” and the mysterious “East” have also similarly fed white American and European ontologies, representational regimes, and cultures. These discussions of the ways in which race exceeds and eludes conventional representation and yet is insistently manifest otherwise in language, grammar, and consequential “area[s] of act” seem helpful in explaining how race in Stein’s writing may appear (or remain invisible) to some as a trivial, overstated, mislocated projection (on the part of race-obsessed readers), though it is a defining element of Stein’s compositional play. The fundamental critical discrepancies in contemporary studies of the literary avant-garde (and throughout literary studies) that arise in the reading of race indicate an ongoing need to address the muddled, difficult, and yet crucial intersections of race and representation in Stein’s contexts, texts, and poetic legacies.

III. Racial Infusions: Red, Red Rose, “Coal Black Rose,” Yellow Buttercup

Red white and blue all out but you. Red white and blue all out but you. Gertrude Stein33

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 33 Stein uses this refrain everywhere. It appears everywhere, including in “Lifting Belly,” “Subject-Cases,” “Natural Phenomena,” A Novel of Thank You and other shorter and longer pieces in various collections. With its intrinsic sing-song rhythm and evocation of the colors of the flag, Stein repeatedly exploits multiple patriotic, symbolic, philosophical, playful resonances in this handy and succinct line.

31 Our pleasure is to do every day the work of that day, to cut our hair and not want blue eyes and to be reasonable and obedient. To obey and not split airs. This is our duty and our pleasure. . . . We eat our breakfast and smoke a cigar. Gertrude Stein, “Bonne Annee: A Play” (1916)

Prunes and apples and butter. We were to write for it. . . . I want to make dresses. I want to knit and to sew and to make that fire. I want to change places. Gertrude Stein, “No” (1915)

In my exploration of some of the less-discussed manifestations of race in Stein’s compositionally exploratory work after 1910, I consider race as profoundly textual—as preconceptual, aesthetic-ontological, history-framing, and representation-structuring rather than merely or extrinsically socio-historical. While attempting to work through the significance of race in Stein’s writings, I have relied on the important theorizing work of

Fred Moten and Denise Ferreira da Silva in particular, and my understanding of race is also shaped by Hortense Spillers (especially her notion of race as a constitutive American grammar) and Saidiya Hartman (on the grammatico-ontological subjection and figural fungibility of the slave’s body). These scholars, and many conversations with David

Lloyd, have been most helpful in my thinking of race at the limits of representation, rather than primarily or merely in the socio-referential markings of skin color (—though such readings of race are also always relevant and in play). Their theorizing of race

(outside of Modernist studies and Stein criticism proper) as that which engenders and works through the fundamental possibilities and processes of modern representation, rather than as a mere historical construct separable from the overarching, constitutive structures of modernity, has been indispensible in locating and reading articulations of race in Stein’s compositions, as that which is always everywhere and elsewhere, most

32 interestingly in writings after and other than “Melanctha,” and yet “[a]s fine as

Melanctha” (finer in my opinion) with regard to stylistic singularity, racial performance, and textual-compositional play with (and exploitation of) the racial.

Denise da Silva’s study, Toward a Global Idea of Race, addresses the enduring structural work of race and the undisturbed entrenchment of racial power and racist practices despite the corrective inclusionary steps and theorizing by numerous scholars and race theorists. Silva emphasizes the always already racially structured foundations of modernity and the elusive “discursive power” of race that enable (and contribute to the ongoing occlusion of) racial subjugation and exclusionary practices even after the deconstruction of race as a socio-historical construct. According to Silva, the “prevailing account of racial subjection” that “retains the presupposition that the racial is extraneous to modern thought” has resulted in the inevitably ineffective treatment of “race” as a discrete notion that can be excised without addressing the foundational power of the racial in the entire “knowledge arsenal” (xiii) and the “whole field of modern representation” (xviii), within which we continue to work, in the very logic of abstractive, transparent representation itself.34 Pointing out the constitutive grammar of modernity as

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 34 Silva notes that the trend of defining race as a mere social construct and a “false” “sociohistorical category” and the turn to less “unbecoming” categories, such as culture, class, and gender, have left in place structures of subjugation written into enduring Euro-defined constructs of universality prevalent in all knowledge-producing institutions. Thus most contemporary discussions fail to undo the effects of racial signification when they address collectivities that “the racial has already inscribed as subaltern” in the very possibility of their being (xxxv). Race continues, even if unnamed, as “a substantive (preconceptual, prehistorical) marker of the outsideness of the others of Europe” (xxxvi). And reigning notions of the “human,” the “rational,” and the “material” continue to conform to an intrinsically racially hierarchical “global (juridic, economic, and moral) configuration” (7), even after the “death of the subject.” Misguided readings of the moment or location of the racial among relatively progressive theorists and critics reinscribe and ultimately “(re)produc[e] non-Europeans as others” in that such readings figure the “(instinctual, cultural, ideological) exclusionary strategies their presence evokes as extraneous to post-Enlightenment, modern, social (moral) configurations” (Silva xxxvi), leaving the underlying and intrinsic matrices of

33 racial, Silva explains the ways in which “the mind’s distinguishing attribute, interiority”

(Silva 44) is both ontologically privileged and exceptionally attributed to European bodies and beings in the very moment in which they “emerge in signification” (27) as human, whereas Europe’s “outer-determined others” emerge as essentially “affectable” beings, “the ones whose minds are subjected to their natural (in the scientific sense) conditions” (xiii). In the context of a global modernity dominated by reigning Euro- and

Euro-American liberal democratic and capitalist representational systems (reliant on the privileging of abstraction, transparency and putatively adequate and commensurable systems of exchange), whiteness still (in practice if no longer in word) stands for

“actualized universal reason” (Silva 101). In necessary contradistinction, Europe’s racial

Other continues to be constituted as the intrinsically “affectable” and unfree subject, the other of true Being, intelligent Spirit, and thought, ever tied to the “unsublatable” trace of particularity signified in the racial body.35

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! racially emergent ontologies and (political, social, ethical, aesthetic, textual, conceptual, and linguistic) representational regimes occluded and undisturbed. 35 Silva notes that within the currently reigning epistemological context, most trends toward inclusive, democratic cosmopolitanisms, though at times proposed to combat racism, would, because of the racial boundaries written into post-Enlightenment notions of humanity, readily accommodate and perpetuate racism (Bernasconi 2002 146). The stubborn effects of racial signification, which resist the aims of “humanist desire” in post-racial critique (such as that of Paul Gilroy’s, whom Silva specifically mentions) (Silva 8-9), show that contemporary race theory has been unable to “reduce or sublate the materiality (body and social position)” (9) in which the subaltern, racial subject has been conceived. Silva argues that the racially specified body by definition is incapable of transcending its material particularity to attain to transcendent universality. This is due in part to the continuingly pervasive naming power of the current institutions of science and history which emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and which still enact the “political-symbolic (the racial and the cultural) engulfment of the globe” (Silva 14) in the name of “scientific universality” (14) and objectivity. The imperial knowledge apparatus constituting the “modern text,” the “modern economy of signification” (xv) would eventually define “the truth of man” along racial lines and further “consolidate reason as the sovereign ruler or producer of modern representation,” perpetuating the disavowal of enfleshment and materiality (19). The far-reaching effectiveness of the West’s “engulfment” strategy tends to preclude the representation and conceptualization of other bodies as anything but other.

34 Key in Silva’s consideration of race is her identification of the institution and implementation of race before and beyond specific socio-historical designations, the

“notion of the racial” being that “which institutes the global ontoepistemological context” of post-Enlightenment modernity (xii-xiii). Silva, Spillers, and Moten are among those who consider race as intrinsic to the “modern ethicopolitical grammar” (Silva 15), as more than and other than the socially referential.36 In his theoretical work, Derrida37 implicitly highlights the space of the racial in his revaluation of nontransparent materiality and the body; he indirectly challenges the “analytics of raciality” (Silva) through his attention to the generative and meaningful work of the trace, representation’s elusive, necessary, internally discrepant other.38 As Silva points out, specifically via her allusion to Derrida’s critique of transparency, the initial designation of humanity through the racial, in the linking of the racial to the “irreducible and unsublatable difference” of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 36 David Lloyd has delineated the ways in which the racial Other of Europe becomes tied to undeveloped, irreducible particularity in the (particularly Kantian and Schillerian) articulation of the Aesthetic and of the (putatively) universal, (purportedly) disinterested aesthetic subject as the model for the representational functions of the abstracted political subject. While David Theo Goldberg has pointed out the extent to which modernity’s form of the nation-state is essentially a “racial state,” involving a “racial configuration of the threat, the external, the unknown, the outside” (Goldberg 34), Silva argues that before and beyond national subject formation, the racial entails an externalization and figuring of the body outside the bounds of essential humanity and the very mode of being of those seen as inherently capable of transcending their materiality, as fit for representative universal citizenship by virtue of their innate spiritual potential. "#!Derrida’s work is in various ways relevant for both Moten and Silva, and influential in my own notions of textuality. ! 38 Silva comments on the race-relevant significance of Derrida’s work in his challenge to representational logic, explaining that in “proposing that spatiality (writing, différance) is the fundamental locus of signification and subjectification, Derrida adds to the critical arsenal a tool that refuses this absolute referent, the transcendental I, that precedes and institutes signification.” Derrida “rewrites the transparent (interior/temporal) I as an effect of differentiation or relationality, of the symbolic regimen where ‘being and meaning’ emerge always already in exteriority and violence, out of the erasure of other (im)possible beings and meanings the trace hopelessly signifies.” The revaluation of “spatiality” in Derrida’s work offers “the possibility of recuperating from the debris of the founding statements of modern representation the effects of its productive violent acts”(26), identifying and re-engaging the conditions of emergence of the racial.

35 materiality and the body is inextricably linked to the logocentric character of representation as such, to the function of language as a system that privileges abstraction through (material as primarily) the pointing sign, a subjugating process Moten also identifies in his discussions of the ontological-representational articulation of race and the suppression of material (Moten’s emphasis) and nonsense.

The apparently easy to miss manifestations of race in Stein’s most representation- resistant, deconstructively working writing have perhaps been largely overlooked precisely because of their (arguably) non-referential and “avant-garde” articulations.

While some avant-garde critics may claim that race is necessarily absent because the writing is non-referential and unstable, essentially “signifying nothing”—least of all race as quintessential concrete-reference—, Stein’s poetic writings, like much avant-garde poetry, require the notably “avant-garde” openness to non-communicative, inarticulate, oblique intimations of feeling and multiple possibilities of unfixable yet otherwise sensible meanings. It is through such openness to the non-“nothing” of the opaque that one is able to hear and feel race insistently at work throughout her writings. Fred

Moten’s elucidating discussion of avant-garde aesthetics and the black radical tradition is particularly helpful here in that he addresses the originary, ontological intersections of race, materiality, and the borders of sense and nonsense, which is precisely the space the avant-garde inhabits.

Moten locates the articulation of race in the very structures of modernity, specifically in Immanuel Kant’s (and in turn, Hegel’s) aesthetic-ontological subjugation and containment of unrestrained imagination by sobering reason, highlighting the

36 aesthetic-ontological disavowal of materiality and potential disorder (which Silva discusses in primarily ontoepistemological terms—as an emphasis on the “symbolic prerogative of interiority” (26)), in which race emerges as the excess and outside of being and is co-articulated in the avant-garde’s breakdown of this dichotomy.39 Focusing on the work of the black avant-garde, Moten explains how the avant-garde intrinsically intersects with the racial and does not annihilate meaning but rather works “by way of an irruption of phonic substance that cuts and augments meaning with a phonographic, materializing inscription,” an “irruption that breaks down the distinction between what is intrinsic and what is given by or of the outside” (14). His In the Break offers the further insights:

This is the story of how apparent nonvalue functions as a creator of value; it is also the story of how value animates what appears as nonvalue. This functioning and this animation are material. (18)

The idea of the avant-garde is embedded in a theory of history. . . . a geographical-racial or racist unconscious, marks and is the problematic out of which or against the backdrop of which the idea of the avant-garde emerges. The specter of Hegel reigns over and animates this constellation. His haunting, haunted formulations constitute one of the ways racism produces the social, aesthetic, political-economic, and theoretical surplus that is the avant-garde. There is a fundamental connection between the (re)production and performance of the surplus and the avant-garde. (31)

In addition to demonstrating the ways in which the avant-garde is bound up with the racial, Moten elucidates the essential interarticulation of the racial with the non-universal figuration of the maternal and female particularity of the body, all of which converge “in

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 39 Robert Bernasconi has also discussed the central function of race in Kant’s Critical Philosophy, as in “Kant as an Unfamiliar Source of Racism” (2002) and elsewhere.

37 the break” and in the “cut” of textual and performative “invagination,” in the “materiality of the miscegenative natal occasion” (71).

In outlining the specific elusive “ani-materiality” of black performance and the black avant-garde, Moten also identifies the space in which modernity’s dissected, disavowed other—excessive materiality, fleshly particularity, and non-transcend-able, thorough embodiment as race—is somehow revalued, re-uttered, and refigured in the insistently singular-universal moment of the avant-garde and especially in certain modes of black music. Over and against conventional expression, we find in these forms “the emergence from broken matrilinearity of an insistent reproductive materiality,” a “kind of lyricism of the surplus—invagination, rupture, collision, augmentation” (40, 26), a breakdown of the hierarchies of modern representation. Moten’s discussion of certain insurrectional, improvisational, and “ensemblic” performance in which the “whole body” is necessarily involved, locates the avant-garde in the moment where unordered sensuality is racialized and in the space where it is reclaimed as elusive, anarchic sound and song which is nevertheless not reducible to “formlessness” (39). These readings of the avant-garde’s inhabitation of the structurally and ontologically racialized hinterlands of creative expression help to describe the potentially progressive space of Stein’s innovative utterances and also point to the ways in which her poetics of intense engagement with the materiality of the body, irruptive nonsense, and the “irreducible phonic substance” (Moten) intrinsically involve an engagement with a space of race.

Insofar as Stein concretely disrupts and challenges the logic of transparent representation in language—especially in texts that are so celebratory of feeling, sound,

38 flavor, scents/sense, sexuality, the concrete materials of everyday domesticity, and the matter of the word—the differently resonant, obscured element of the racial in her work exceeds conventional referential modes and might resist straightforward translation into a clear position on racial issues but still in some ways seems to reinscribe the racial logic of dominant signifying systems. The textu(r)al irruptions of race through oblique and semi- opaque language in her writing show Stein reflecting the dominant view of race as hypervisible mark in colored “skin” (of “the Negro and the Oriental” in particular (Silva

158, quoting Robert Park)) even as her writing gestures toward the global- ontoepistemological landscape and the interstitial, discrepant work of race prior to the conscious referential attribution of color or category to racially marked individuals. She exploits and reinforces, while also playing with, the most automatic associations, conventional denotations, and communally sanctioned uses of words such as “white,”

“yellow,” “Chinamen,” “Negroes,” “coon,” and “civilization” (as essentially tied to white western cultures for instance), placing them in dynamic relation with and differently sounding them through ostensibly racially-“innocent” white-American domestic and intimate vocabularies.

Stein’s unsystematic, contradictory, and delimited perspectives on race are in some sense reflected in her ambivalent statements on naming and the nominal, descriptive capacities of language—as both communicatively adequate and “solid” (EA

206) and also as always partial, reductive, and trace-ridden. Stein resists the refuctive—

39 that is, the reductive—forces of dominant language-use.40 While at times dismissive of nouns in certain instances, Stein uses them freely (and innovatively) and often emphasizes the import of the utterer’s or writer’s singularly felt affections for and associations attached to the words and sounds themselves—as we sense everywhere in her “caressing” of nouns and other words—in her uses, for instance, of words such as

“alas” (Alice), “bee” (Alice B. Toklas, honey), Ada, Rose, May (Bookstaver), Willie

(Shakespeare), “cow” (with (arguably) sexual, dairy, fatty, defecatory, female, and capitalist resonances41), and “butter” (all things richly flavored, textually slippery, and also queer—“butt her”). Stein’s queerly proliferative and disseminative, poetic uses of language constantly play off of the ubiquitous sense- and perception- and world-framing reverberations of race and the ever-infusive “analytics of raciality” (Silva). As other critics have mentioned, her mountain of writings, published and unpublished, form a sort of “crazy quilt” (Chessman 8; Ford 75) in which she sews and sows and juxtaposes so many unexpected pieces and laterally refractive soundings that require the textually rich figural work of race.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 40 I make use of the horrible pun here for the sake of an alternative figuration and thinking through of the potentially fruitful significance in her handling of language. My unintended initial typo here is potentially suggestive: we might read Stein as resisting and transforming the reductive (through slight changes of letters, keys, registers, and tones, as in the slip from D to F for instance) handling of linguistic material into the refuc(k)tive “using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing” of language—the refractive, the fructive, the reft, the defective, frictive, and at times fucous realm of sound-attendant voicing and arranging. (From the OED online we find that fucous designates “the nature of fucus or ‘paint’— where fucus is defined as “Paint or cosmetic for beautifying the skin; a wash or colouring for the face. Frequent in 17th c. writers.” From the Latin: fucus: “rock-lichen, red dye, rouge, false colour.” And we thereby return to coincidence of language play and racial masking—such as in the performative use of blackface or yellowface.) 41 David Lloyd has pointed out that the work of Raymond Crotty may be relevant here—particularly in his comments on the originary etymological ties between the word “capital” and “cattle” via “caput” and the counting of cattle heads in one’s herds as a founding step in the development of capitalist economies.

40 While many critics have addressed in isolated passages some of the most stridently or provocatively racist language in Stein’s writing, I consider here various

Stein texts as parts of a corpus of compositions that are loosely knit together not only in their similarly disjunctive language but in intertextual repetitions of patterns and sets of familiarly recurring words such as those mentioned above and many more, including

“knit,” “sew” (and “sow”), and needles (and “needless”) for instance. These textual ties underscore the deeper (and broader) structural and strategic soundings and figurations of race by Stein. Though critics have commented on some of the most blatantly racist- sounding passages in Stein’s corpus as textually trivial or essentially at odds with Stein’s progressive transformations of language, I would argue that these moments in her work are compositionally significant and are as much a part of her “spiritual autobiography”

(Dydo above) and innovative compositional practice as the other many connective words and textual elements of her writing. We might consider the mass of writings over the years not only as a “spiritual” text of sorts but even more as a sort of passionately woven sensual fabric that bears the imprints of body’s life and that is as significant in how it is felt as much as read. (Stein insisted herself told her readers, “Think about it and you will see what I mean by what you feel.”42) Within such a textual fabric, race in Stein’s

“language that rises” shows up not (merely) as some random accidental material but as integral threads, or meaningfully placed, connective “buttons” that contribute to the overall effect and feel of the material. Stein herself was drawn to this texturally rich domestic language of form and feeling. Her frequent affectionate allusions to Toklas’s

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 42 Quoted from How to Write in Franken 2000, p. 214.

41 knitting in some ways tie her writing and reading processes to the singular, rhythmically satisfying material of love and life (for the writer as inseparable from the lover, the knitter, the diner).

A survey sampling of Stein’s writing might help to convey the sense of interconnectedness and multiply textured sound, surface, sight, and sense play that constantly animates her texts in ways that continually reverberate with the racial. Most noticeably, in the midst of the innocently ordinary, there are sown throughout, the many direct references to color, physiognomy, raciality, and the use of racist epithets:

Color cook color him. . . . America key America key. . . ./ By the white white white white, by the white white white white white white, by the white white white white by the white by the white white white white. / Needless in pins. (“America”) (1913)

Coal hole./ If coal oil means water and a memory and fine. . . . / Co hie. Wee nus, poodle nut, all bow with cut hup. Leave len. A go lash. Lips tip. No pie. Rest. / We tight, Nigger. Nasal, noisete. [sic] Not we when. Butt, but set. All that, cold. nigh jigger. (“Bee Time Vine”) (1913)

We describe the conquest english and french english and a missionary. . . . Did Rose say that she meant to diffuse to diffuse hope and reluctantly retain kindness. . . . Why are there whites to condole to console. Why are there whites to console to condole. (“Why Are There Whites to Console”) (1922)

. . . . Not to express address, egress, Negress Negress. Negress egress, address express, humbly apologise. . . . /. . . . a way as in case of it, more in case of it than before and the finishing touches. The finish may make it shine, a bottle of wine to make it shine and two little niggers to squeeze her. (“Subject-Cases: The Background of A Detective Story”) (1922)

. . . . indeed gifts may be said to be chosen rather from the occasion offered by the passage of a chinese or perhaps a Korean stranger than from the desire to study colonisation. . . .Let me understand relationships. . . .Waltzes have been called hesitation/ Buffon was a great naturalist and described hesitation. He described their hesitation. . . . / We have often remarked that a certain type of character is present to us. Ini meeni miney mo catch a nigger by the toe if he hollers let him go. Iny meeny miney mo. (“Yes You Do”) (1922)

. . . . she went away not alone no indeed accompanied to Russia to America and to Indo China. . . ./ Who are Mr. and Mrs. Mont Blanc. . . . Supposing a man in Morocco had a mother a wife and a daughter and he left Morocco and came to live where he had plenty of water would he be as happy not happy would he be as busy as he had been in Morocco. . . ./ To be returned at once Negroes, dear me and having heard it. (A Novel of Thank You)

It is natural that from the standpoint of white all color is paler. It is natural that from the stand-point of day-light all color is whiter it is natural that from the stand-point of snow-white all color in day-light is blue white or cloud white or green white. . . . It is natural from the stand-point of white all color is as light. . . ./ Did they decide between China and Canada between North and South America between Algeria and Bugey. . . ./ There are three Negroes they do not at all resemble one another. / Moreover there are three Negroes Negroes and women five of them and they do not at all resemble one another. . . ./ They had their means of doubling and descent. Would a mother a Turk be a father an Egyptian. . . . / Babies have to understand added chinamen. . . . (“Natural Phenomena”) (1925)

If it were possible to kill five thousand chinamen by pressing a button would it be done. / Saint Therese not interested. . . . Saint Therese. Could a Negro be be with a beard to see and to be. Saint Therese. Never have to have seen a negro there and be with it so. . . Saint Ignatius: . . . Leave left as lost. Might white. From the stand-point of white. / Saint Sulpice. A Masterpiece. (Four Saints in Three Acts) (1927)

The cousin of Mr. Reynolds had a brother and a sister. The brother was a doctor who specialized in oriental diseases and he married a well-to-do and rather stout Greek woman. / She felt she was a Chinese heroine. . . . / Joseph Lane was not of mixed blood although anybody might imagine anything about him and they did imagine that. . . . / Mrs. Reynolds sometimes talked about Turkey and sometimes she talked about Mexico. She even sometimes talked about Europe and Northern Africa. . . . Was he born in a church, was he born in a town, was he born brown. (Mrs. Reynolds) (1940)43

Insofar as words inevitably mean and retain their historical sedimentation, as Stein intended and knew them to, Stein’s corpus is anything but free from race. What might !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 43 Specific passages can be found in: “Why Are There Whites to Console” (In As Fine As Melanctha 199,, 200); “Subject-Cases” (As Fine As Melanctha 14, 30); “Yes You Do” (Painted Lace 121); A Novel of Thank You 65-66; “Natural Phenomena” (Painted Lace 177, 204, 210); Four Saints in Three Acts (In Operas and Plays 15-16, 18, 37); Mrs. Reynolds: 23, 27, 31, 42, 53

43 first draw our attention to this fact are passages such as the ones above, in which the eruption of race is blatant. But these are just the most obvious manifestations of race in

Stein’s writing.

Well beyond the more conceptual-referential “sense”-function of color-words or race-evocative vocabulary, racially infused “airs” and “tones” are everywhere present in

Stein’s writing and compositionally refract and accentuate (and are slanted by) these more explicit and often racist textual moments. In closely reading Stein texts, we find that ostensibly “neutral” or non-“racial” words, material, and pleasures are everywhere enlivened with race-inflected meanings and associations when they are not read in imposed isolation, whitened and bracketed off from the less seemly language. In the same texts from which the passages above are taken, the textually suggestive and relational workings of race-infusion are evident. The words “white,” “black,” “Negress,”

“Negroes,” “nigger,” “chinese,” “colonisation,” “chinamen,” “China,” and “red,” above, for instance, are still meaningfully at work in the surrounding text and contexts and thus repeatedly imbue all things domestic and ordinary with the racial:

Alas, alas the pull alas the bell alas the coach in china, alas the little put in leaf alas the wedding butter meat, alas the receptacle, alas the back shape of mussle, mussle and soda. (Tender Buttons “FOOD”: “COOKING” 1914)

How can a narrative relate hairs to heads and Elizabeth to Elizabethans. How can it. How can it relate coats to hats and shoes to homes shrubs and houses. How can a narrative relate heights to shawls, ribbons to carpets and rest to cups. . . . How can a narrative relate pillows to pillows and white to white and buttons to buttons. . . . I very easily meant to be a girl and I scarcely measured why I was colored. How were you colored. . . ./ To conclude./ First food./ Second stewed./ Third brood. (“Why Are There Whites to Console” 1922)

What do they seed broadcast, they seed broadcast the respect for colored glass. White and rose-color preferably. When opaque white and blue. Red white and

44 blue all out but you. . . . Antedate and a plate, and to placate and to antedate. . . (“Subject-Cases: The Background of A Detective Story” 1922)

We have been inspired by a frontispiece. In this case it is an engraving of a well known series of animals among which are included elephants sheep, birds dogs and frogs. They are placed in various attitudes to demonstrate their habits and the natural condition in which they multiply. . . .What did they place on a tray, roses orange blossoms in flower, glasses in cases, barometers and three figures one with a chicken one with a sheep and one with this advantage. Beside this there were coral beads. And here and there there were four great memories, Buffon, Victor Hugo, La Fontaine and Lamartine. . . . (“Yes You Do” 1922)

Natural phenomena consist in shouts in leaves and in nests, natural phenomena consist in shoes lives and roads. . . . it is difficult to know why it is easier to deceive with fish flesh or fowl, flesh is used in relation to oxen cows and bulls fowl in relation to hens roosters and ducks and fish in connection with craw fish eggs and seasons and also forbidden. . . . / Natural phenomena black and yellow, natural phenomena black and yellow. . . ./ There is a great difference between to be and to be rose. There is a great difference between to be rose and to be rose. . . . Have you seen a race to-day. Yes sir. (“Natural Phenomena” 1925)

Saint Therese. Face and face face about. Face to face face and face face out. . . . Saint Chavez. Might make milk sung. Saint Chavez. Might make. In place. Saint Therese. Saint Therese. In face of in face of might make milk sung sung face to face face in face place in place in place of face to face. Milk sung. (Four Saints in Three Acts 1927)

Mrs. Reynolds liked roses to be roses. That is the way she felt about roses. She felt that way about all roses. . . . they often talked about dates in cakes and they often talked about bread in soup, they also often talked about eggs and butter but most often of all they talked about guinea hens and geese. (Mrs. Reynolds 1940)

The significant place of such textual dynamics in Stein’s corpus is accentuated by the fact that these connections do not occur solely within single texts but also across texts, including many other pieces that affectionately take up the familiar and comfortable (and always already racialized) vocabulary of Stein’s life.

45 Though it is difficult to discern exactly what her handling of race—as both indelibly marked in “skin” (as in Robert Park’s definition44) and (perhaps unwittingly) as elusive trace—might mean or imply politically, the textual sampling above begins to show that the prominent race-related elements in Stein’s work merit continued critical attention. Reading Stein on the matter of race is unavoidably riddled with complications

(textual, conceptual, political, ethical, and other) but also instructive and rewarding.

While far from innocent, Stein was provocatively open and often textually creative in her notions and spinning of race in various ways that, whatever her intention might have been, illustrate the persistence of race as the non-representational, extra-symbolic, insistent trace in language, material, arrangement, and structure. Stein’s exploitation of race as textually rich and malleable material demonstrates at least some ways in which the very instability and evasiveness of racial terms and categories such as white, black, and yellow—like the “fungibility” of the slave’s body (in Saidiya Hartman’s terms)— render race inexhaustibly useful to both patriarchal power and also to the poet.

In my broad, chronologically spread-out study of Stein’s writings, I hope to examine manifestations and structurally connective webs of race and “raciality” that consistently shape and inform Stein’s playful poetics over the years. Many critics, including Dydo, Perloff, Chessman, and DeKoven, for instance, have insightfully and attentively traced the oblique yet concrete suggestiveness in numerous Stein texts, delineating the possibilities of sense-constructing in the more opaque pieces by following various material resonances and progressions (or disjunctive juxtapositions) of sounds !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 44 See Daniel Kim, Denise da Silva, and Henry Yu for further exposition of Robert Park’s influential school of sociology in the early twentieth century.

46 and words, and importantly charting out varied, whimsical readerly practices and postures that serve to yield the most rewarding and meaningful readings of Stein. For those unfamiliar with Stein’s most radically representation-resistant work, certain lines of interpretation relying heavily on punning, homophonic sound associations, graphic resemblance, vague rhythmic impressions, cross-lingual soundings, or slight aural resonances might seem overly subjective—and at times they may be. But Stein’s writing both invites readers’ varied, singular impressions (including personal phenomenological and perspectivally-slanted associations) and engages in precisely the sort of unorderly, seemingly childish play with language that engenders feeling and meaning through such handling of words and their parts.

The most characteristically oblique and opaque Steinese requires readers to construct and posit playful threads of meaning in ways that sidestep or move beyond referential signification. In a simple yet substantive word like “bread,” for instance, Stein invites us to hear and see “read” and “red,” to move from there to “bed” (to perhaps intuit there the possible link to rose—in “bed of roses”), then to “soil,”—and “seed” and “sow”

(and “sew,” “knit,” “buttons”…) and consequently to “sow” as rhyming with “cow”— and possibly a shift through “soil” to “oil” and “butter,” in which we also hear “utter,”

“mutter” (“mother”), and “udder.” This sort of sound-and-word associative play and movement is prevalent throughout Stein’s writing, along with other innovatively suggestive modes of utterance and striking uses of rhythm, as we see and hear distinctly in her short “Susie Asado.” And just as in “Susie Asado,” where the plays on words and sounds interact with the distinctly flamenco-evoking rhythms of the words (discussed by

47 Perloff) and turn upon a sort of racializing exoticization effect (addressed by Josephine

Park), we find that such proliferative threads of sound and sight/spelling association overwhelmingly rely on the suggestive, productive, text- and world-framing work of race.

As most Stein readers have noticed, Stein ventured to approach pleasure, affections, and all the “cosy” material and texture of life through often disconcerting, different uses and animations of language and words, in ways that clearly distinguished her from a more cerebral and masculine modernist set and that kept her writing closer to feeling and the body. By delving into the potentially or putatively formless and incommunicable pleasures of the text and the body, Stein was bound to have to deal with and move in the racial as immanent to the material and the conditions of possibility of her daily rhythms and pleasures. The playfully evocative, tickling, seductive, often impressive effects of her particular arrangements of words in composition make her writing compelling and irresistible to many who share her “unfortunate predilection for words” (Canby 81).45 We cannot avoid however, the unexpected and indirect ways that the sort of playfulness that this writing incorporated (as Laura Doyle and Michael North have suggested of Stein and her contemporaries) the somewhat fearful, somewhat exciting, always evocative, “wild,” unknown outside as accessible and exploitable only through the constructs and ontologies of race.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 45 In his complaints regarding Stein’s insistence on dealing with medium that involved sense despite her consistent shunning of sense, Henry Canby, excerpted above, concluded that Stein was actually artistically “hindered by her unfortunate predilection for words” (81). In his opinion, she should have stuck to a non- signifying, non-linguistic medium if she was going to use words and sounds as she did, in ways that ostensibly disregarded meaning and did not conform to literary standards and communicative norms.

48 We find one early example of Stein criticism that shows some of the indirect ways in which race has always inflected both poetic practices and the putatively universal, race-blind realm of literary-aesthetic judgment and criticism in a review by Sherwood

Anderson, an avid Stein devotee. In a 1922 piece for The New Republic, Anderson wrote:

Miss Stein is a worker in words with the same loving touch in her strong fingers that was characteristic of the women of the kitchens of the brick houses in the town of my boyhood. She is an American woman of the old sort, one who cares for the handmade goodies and who scorns the factory-made foods, and in her own great kitchen she is making something with her materials, something sweet to the tongue and fragrant to the nostrils. . . . She is laying word against word, relating sound to sound, feeling for the taste, the smell, the rhythm of the individual word. She is attempting to do something for the writers of our English speech that may be better understood after a time, and she is not in a hurry. And one has always that picture of the woman in the great kitchen of words, standing there by a table, clean, strong, with red cheeks and sturdy legs, always quietly and smilingly at work. If her smile has in it something of the mystery, to the male at least, of the Mona Lisa, I remember that the women in the kitchens on the wintry mornings wore often that same smile.

She is making new, strange and to my ears sweet combinations of words. As an American writer I admire her because she, in her person, represents something sweet and healthy in our American life, and because I have a kind of undying faith that what she is up to in her word kitchen in Paris is of more importance to writers of English than the work of many of our more easily understood and more widely accepted word artists.46

Anderson’s endorsement of Stein links her sensual-gustatory writerly innovation and productivity with a distinctly racial, ruddy-cheeked, white-American feminine domesticity, reflecting the fact that a whitened, putatively neutralized and universalized racial image was necessary for Stein’s contribution to be seriously considered as

“literary.” While he marks her distinction as a poet who appreciates the singularly !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 46 Anderson excerpt from “Four American Impressions.” The New Republic, October 11, 1922. (Critical Response 171)

49 incommunicable pleasures of the culinary and sensual, in contradistinction to Henry

Canby above, Anderson makes a point to write Stein into white American-ness while also associating American work with a distinctly white Western European aesthetic tradition of purportedly universal standards of greatness (via the exemplary canonical figures of

Mona Lisa and Da Vinci). The opposing but often equally racializing and racially- framed critique of both Stein’s proponents and detractors reflects the great extent to which race has been a dynamic component of literary canonization and criticism, even when it comes to the “avant-garde.”

Stein’s writing is of course informed by her own experiences of marginalization—as a Californian, Jewish, queer female poet in an oppressively white male, often deeply anti-Semitic Anglo-American literary world. That she personally faced the difficulties of anti-Semitic, misogynistic, and heteronormative pressures of her time is undoubtable, but so are the palpable racial and at times racist strains of so much of her writing, which are perhaps even most strategically at work in response to such conditions of potential and relative marginalization. Insofar as her writing is progressive, it demonstrates the many ways in which the phenomenological particularity of body’s being is both singularly productive and necessarily limited. Stein’s life and writings may show that being part of a racially persecuted minority (or having such heritage in one’s background, coming from a people who have been oppressed) and being radically progressive in some ways, does not preclude the possibility of also being racist and exclusionary in other ways. And yet, by expanding the ways in which language can sound and mean, she broadens our understanding of being and creative-poetic making as

50 both intelligent and more deeply grounded in the inaccessible opacity of materiality than we can explain. In my study of Stein’s writing in the following chapters, I hope to address the complexity of less-(or not-yet)studied, unexpected ways in which her writing articulates race everywhere, in ways that not only challenge our notions of representation, language, and literary-aesthetic value, but also force us to face the pervasive ways in which race continues to structure representation, language, readership tendencies, and the literary establishment, regardless of, and even through benevolent intentions and otherwise ostensibly progressive sensibilities and agendas. Stein’s writing inhabits and continues to speak to this conflicted, paradoxical, and occluded space in poetry and language.

51 Chapter 2 Representation and the Color Line: Articulations of the Race Age

. . . . I began then when evolution was still exciting very exciting. I just found on the quays Darwin’s Descent of Man and I have just given it to Louis Bromfield who had never read it. After all to him Darwin was not so near as he had been when I began knowing everything.

Science meant everything and any one who had an active mind could complete mechanics and evolution…. Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography

The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line, —the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. W.E. B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk

. . . . the progress of my conceptions was the natural progress entirely in accordance with my epoch as I am sure is to be quite easily realised if you think over the scene that was before us all from year to year. . . . The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything. Gertrude Stein, Composition as Explanation

Though one might not expect it, W.E.B. Du Bois’s profoundly telling statement that defined the twentieth century by “the problem of the color line,” resounds throughout

Stein’s disjunctive writings and fragmented musings. Notwithstanding the dominant tendencies in academically validated readings of Stein, the persistent, frequent irruptions of race throughout Stein’s writings, and her lifelong preoccupation with racial distinctions and categories, are not surprising when one considers the climate of her times: the pervasiveness of racial violence and racist public discourses—both among

52 Americans (among whom she placed herself and with whom Stein strongly identified) and in colonial France; rampant imperial ambitions, conquests, and exhibitions; the development of “scientific” theories of race and difference; general hysteria over racial

“degeneration” and the rise in popularity of eugenics; intensely racialized nativism in the

U.S., which led to racially circumscribed immigration legislation; the explosion of reproductive technologies and all forms of color-contrastive visual culture. Numerous scholars have discussed the intensity with which nationalisms and nativisms, scientificized racial preoccupations, and prominent objectifications of the “exotic” (all of which reflected near-universal assumptions of the racially hierarchical ontology and representational structures that are still in place), were palpably in the air and pervaded both popular culture and official policies in this period.

Stein’s emergence and participation in the race-obsessions of the day have largely been glossed over by many of her readers, often overshadowed by emphases on the potentials of feminist, queer, and textually innovative performance in her work apart from race. It is, however, useful in reading Stein to consider that the decades spanning her life

(from the 1880s through the 1930s) not only constituted an emerging feminist or budding queer moment, but also a global historical period that was overwhelmingly saturated with and fascinated by questions of race, images of racial caricature, racially trademarked consumer products, and riotous racial tension and violence. It is obvious that a writer’s historical situation would influence her thinking and writing; so to state that the racial tones of Gertrude Stein’s world affected her work might in itself seem a moot point. But given the dominant tones of Stein criticism, it may be helpful to recollect the racial

53 atmosphere of her times not only to show how unlikely it would be for race to manifest itself in her work merely or primarily as isolated, minor, or anomalous blips, but also to recall the kinds and forms of racism, racist reproductive anxieties, and race-exploiting pleasures that constituted her everyday world and everywhere informed her suggestive word choices, associative chains, and arrangements. Considering the details of such racial period-history here might help to contextualize some of the (perhaps) surprising ways (and the vast extent to which) race infuses the language and form of her unconventional and indirectly suggestive writings, as a crucial element in her explorations of and plays with the limits of representation.

I. The Race Age

The race obsession of Stein’s generation manifested itself ubiquitously as what might arguably come closest to the definitive marker of the times (if such a thing could be identified) and the definer par excellence of national unity and character—it was at the heart of the widespread celebration of Western imperial conquests and colonial projects, intense domestic racial conflicts, pervasive curiosity regarding racial difference and exotic others, all forms of entertainment, and the burgeoning of scientific and biological studies on human types, as well as the founding of the anthropological and social sciences. Race, color, and race-based animosity were fundamentally and openly definitive in all areas and ways of being, acting, enjoying, and meaning. Questions of

54 identity, personhood, and Americanness were, as they still are to a great extent, thoroughly constituted and rent by questions of race.

In contradistinction to the now more covert exercises of racial power and the contemporary disavowal of race as a false (and therefore putatively inconsequential, minor, and passé) construction, the U.S. and Europe of Stein’s day openly and visibly celebrated its racial thinking.47 The period’s nearly unanimous, unapologetic endorsement of racial categories and belief in a naturally racially hierarchized humanity defined their era as much as (and partly in the form of) the period’s celebration of scientific discovery and truth. It is within the context of a notably widespread, a priori racialized scientific positivism (in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), a world of scientifically justified racial hierarchy and intensely racially inflected “science,” and a climate of voraciously nationalistic imperialism (both in the U.S. and in Europe), that the racially prescribed academic fields of anthropology and ethnology grew.48 As the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 47 Whereas current intellectual, academic, and politically correct discourses tend to sublimate and disavow all the ways in which racial power, racist assumptions, and race-based legacies continue to structure and inform the profound disparities in social, juridical, economic, philosophical, educational, aesthetic, and ontological arenas (thereby implicitly attributing all such disparity to “natural” tendencies and individual capacities), the academics, authorities, and public discourses of Stein’s lifetime openly attributed all existing equalities to innate superiority on the part of Euro-Americans. 48 It is notable that it was during Stein’s time, around the turn of the century, that the term “racialization” reportedly came into use (Murji and Solomos 6), both by ethnologists and the lay public. And it is telling to note that in its history, the term was initially “used mainly in the sense of deracialization, taken to mean the loss of racial qualities through increasing mixture” (Murji and Solomos 6). This historical detail on the rise of “deracialization” in race-theoretical language, prior to the popular use of “racialization,” indicates not only the anxieties of white Americans and Europeans regarding racial mixture but also the fact that the idea of the racial was so thoroughly tied up with existing notions of essential, possible forms of being, that both common sense and reigning academic disciplines took “man” as always already racialized into pure, distinct, mutually exclusive groups. Thus “racialization,” the attributing of racial meaning to physical or human characteristics, was less employed precisely because the “racial” was seen, by scholars, scientists, politicians and housewives alike, as predetermined and not attributable to anything but nature. The verb “racializing” in reference to human action, social construction, or the imposing of racial significance was simply not needed, or perhaps even conceived of, in the lexicon of the time. Rather, what was seen as that which could (belatedly and degeneratively) act upon intrinsic “racial” characteristics, which if “diluted” or

55 realm of empirically researched studies extended to human behavior and communities, biologically based and scientifically explained divisions of race served as the “natural” context for the study of different kinds of individuals and communities. As I will discuss further below, and as Denise da Silva has outlined in her study on the “global idea of race,” race as an ontologically grounding and scientifically authorized concept would activate “a whole power/knowledge apparatus, scientia racialis, which deployed a series of strategies that constituted the political-symbolic arsenal” (Silva 113). Such an

“analytics of raciality” would further inform the sciences of man, which would take as specimens for study all those seen as marked by “irreducible and unsublatable difference”

(Silva 116) and rewrite “the manifoldness of human bodies into signifiers

(exteriorizations) of the mind” (116).49

Even before any sort of Western-universal scientific consensus or systematic discourse regarding race arose (which Denise da Silva and others have dated around the late nineteenth century), it was common among both Europeans and Euro-Americans to view people according to “phenotypical variation” and as definitively divided into “a relatively few discontinuous categories” (Banton 13). By Stein’s time, differing names and rankings of races usually divided humanity into three to five major groups, but always with the “white” European race(s) as the superior, exceptionally self-determining

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! deviated from in any manner would constitute a denaturalization of originary racial being, was the human process of “deracialization,” associated largely with racial mixing and assimilation. 49 As Silva has argued, though the global context of raciality would encompass European being as well, the exceptionality of Europeans could be preserved by their being written as transparent individuals, as superiorly developed, self-determining subjects of knowledge in collusion with “productive nomos,” the transcendent creative force of the universe. The rest of humankind would be written specifically in relation to the European as the object of reason’s productive force, determined by exterior “laws of nature” and therefore inferior and unfree (127).

56 type. Though the systematic classification of non-European “natives” in conquered territories had not been firmly established in the earlier centuries of “discovery,” as early as 1684, François Bernier would claim that humanity could be broken down into “four or five species or races” based on sufficiently “remarkable” criteria of “difference” (Bernier

1-2, ed. Bernasconi). In the States, the race-defining work of various European writers, including the French naturalist Buffon, informed articulations of race as essential species- like differentiation, as for instance, the writings of Thomas Jefferson have shown.50

Varied but essentially similar contributions from European philosophy and science, from

Kant, Hegel, and others, also shaped American notions of race from the early nineteenth century on.51

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 50 Thomas Jefferson’s repeated references to the views of the “Count de Buffon” in his Notes on the State of Virginia testify to familiarity with the work among the educated in early U.S. history (45-49). In the mid- eighteenth century, French naturalist Buffon’s widely read work had discussed varying races as shaped by climate into somewhat mutable categories based on environment. Though Jefferson takes pains to correct various specific conclusions of “Mons. de Buffon” on the natural conditions and animal life on the American continent (frequently of Buffon’s suggestions of the diminutive and inferior nature of American life forms in comparison to European), the compulsion to address Buffon’s claims in particular demonstrates the relative authority attributed to Buffon as a naturalist, and the familiarity with his work among Jefferson’s class of American men. Expounding on his own views of racial difference, Jefferson likens the presence of “natural” differences among human races to the species-differentiation among different “races” of animals. The utterly incommensurate difference implied in such distinctions is elaborated in his discussion on “Animals” in Virginia. Jefferson claims that “[e]very race of animals seems to have received from their Maker certain laws of extension at the time of their formation” (48) that allow for limited degrees of variation; he states that animals are thus capable of some degree of development or improvement, variable according to circumstance and climate, within their own species, but still remain fixed and unalterable between species: “Below these limits they cannot fall, nor rise above them. What intermediate station they shall take may depend on soil, on climate, on food, on a careful choice of breeders. But all the manna of heaven would never raise the mouse to the bulk of the mammoth” (48). That such views were widely shared in the U.S. in the nineteenth century is seen in the fact that as Dana Nelson has noted, Jefferson’s Notes and its race-related content became an oft-cited point of reference as “[o]ne of the most pervasively influential considerations of slavery and Africans in American history” (16). 51 Robert Bernasconi notes that Immanuel Kant, later in the eighteenth century, “was a leading proponent of the concept of race when its scientific status was still far from secure” (2002 146) and suggests that “Kant can legitimately be said to have invented the scientific concept of race insofar as he gave the first clear definition of it” (147). Kant divided humanity into “four races” that were permanent and based on “hereditary dissimilarities” (Kant 9, ed. Bernasconi), the “enduring distinctions immediately recognizable within the human genus” (Kant, 11). Bernasconi also suggests that Kant’s racism is significantly

57 The radical thoroughness of national characterization by racial division and differentiation, the racially defined socio-political and cultural structures, and the careful guarding of color lines on all levels of American life in particular, is succinctly summed up by Houston Baker in his depiction of the U.S. of the early twentieth century.52 Baker reminds his readers that this was a racially charged era ruled by and filled with the likes of “Tom Buchanans in the upper echelon, Theodore Bilbo and Woodrow Wilson in local and national politics, Lothrop Stoddard and William Graham Sumner in scholarship,

Octavus Roy Cohen in popular media, and Snopses everywhere” (1989: 75). In contradistinction to literary critics or historians who would characterize race and racial conflict as local problems of the period, as regionally attributable to a backward

American South or to a very limited set of race-evoking extremists, and as extricable from an otherwise non-racial, non-hierarchical and genuinely universal human/global or national context, Baker and other historians and scholars have contributed to less partial considerations of an era deeply marked by “patent nonsense and murderous exclusion”

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! “integrated into his philosophy,” evident in his Critique of Judgment and much “at stake” in his “discussion of teleology. (147). Kant’s views of the racial thus fundamentally informed his widely impactive definitions of mind, man, and being. Shortly after Kant, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s nascent anthropology named the “five principal varieties of mankind” (Blumenbach 27, ed. Bernasconi): “Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, Malayan. “ And later, Hegel would speak of a hierarchy of races based on “the distinctive character of the continents” (Hegel 39, ed. Bernasconi), with Europe as the model for development and perfection of humanity. Naturalist Georges Cuvier’s well-known work would locate the lines of the most significant primary racial distinctions in the divisions separating the “white” race from the “yellow” and “black” (Silva 106). 52 It is given that David Theo Goldberg, Denise F. Da Silva, and others have detailed the workings of essentially racial and racist ontologies in the very construction and conceptualization of the modern nation- state. As Saidiya Hartman also points out, the spirit of the times and the nation were entirely consonant with the ruling in Plessy v. Fergson. So my noting of the racially framed dynamics of this period in the U.S. and Europe is for the purpose of illustrating the strikingly blatant and overpowering visibility and insistent assertions of such racial dynamics in the culture and life in Stein’s world.

58 (Baker 76) along clear racial lines.53 As Denise Da Silva has demonstrated and Saidiya

Hartman has outlined, all the apparatuses of knowledge and science, and all areas of culture and forms of popular entertainment and enjoyment during this time were thoroughly steeped in the paradoxes of race and massively consequential notions of racially articulated ontological difference.

Though it may be argued that Stein was removed from most of the racial matters defining the U.S. American scene (uniquely inflected by the race question though sharing in the essential assumptions of Europe) at the turn of the century, it is notable that Stein enthusiastically identified herself as a patriotic American with a distinctly American sensibility all her life.54 In addition to staying closely connected with the American scene through the press (as well as through frequent correspondence with close friends in the

States and through often being surrounded by American literary or artistic expatriates), and largely in sync with the cultural and racialist trends in both the U.S. and in imperial

France throughout her life,55 Stein spent her youth in the Oakland and San Francisco area, where the Chinese comprised around ten percent of the entire population and were the largest ethnic and racial minority group in the region.56 Chinese laborers, fruit sellers, domestics, and entertainers would have been key in informing her family’s heightened !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 53 It is telling that a key publication in the Afro-American community of the period, founded by the NAACP, with W.E.B. Du Bois as its first editor in 1910, was called The Crisis. Du Bois’s critique of the U.S. and the West in general were groundbreaking in his time and still stand out as among the rare, honest expositions of early twentieth-century life and culture as inseparable from the global crisis of the color line. 54 Stein did not set up house with Leo in Paris until 1903. 55 I will discuss more on the French racial scene below and in chapter five where I will address Stein’s (and Toklas’s) writings on her Indochinese servants. 56 Peter O’Neill has discussed the prominent presence of the Chinese in the San Francisco region in the late nineteenth century (122–25). Stein spent the majority of her youth and schooling years in the Oakland area, from 1879-1892 (between the ages of five and eighteen for Stein).

59 sense of whitened, middle-class belonging because of their highly exoticized presence, and were definitely instrumental in the general facility with which West Coast Jewish

Americans became enfolded into the white majority.57 Stein was eight years old when the California-endorsed Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was passed. Her environment throughout her formative years both before and after the passage of the Bill (as

Californians continued to vent hostility upon the Chinese population and rallied for years through the 1880s and 90s for an indefinite extension of the temporary bill) was saturated with racial tension and anti-Chinese sentiment.58 As a voracious young reader and curious youth from a relatively well-off middle class family, Stein would no doubt have been familiar with the frequent anti-Chinese articles and artwork in publications such as

The Overland Monthly (which often featured work by Bret Harte, author of the infamous

“Ah Sin” poem), The Daily Bee, The Oakland Evening Tribune, The Morning Call, The

San Francisco Chronicle, and other newspapers and magazines which regularly featured anti-Chinese material throughout the 1880s, as well as with the popular caricaturing images of the Chinese in all manner of advertisements, trading cards, and trademarks.

That Stein was specifically aware of heated race concerns in the U.S. even after her move to Paris is evident not only in various details (concerning racial stereotypes,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 57 Stein’s mother’s diary notes instances of interacting with Chinese sellers in her household-related shopping and suggests such interactions were not uncommon. 58 That “Chinamen” were a very familiar part of her childhood landscape and that in distinctly racially prescribed roles and contexts is mentioned in passing by Stein in Everybody’s Autobiography, where in reminiscing about childhood activities she recalls that in addition to swimming and the like, they would “go down into the quicksilver mines and where the Chinamen were working” (303). Not only did Stein most likely have frequent everyday exposure to (if not interactions with) the visible Chinese population (further documented in part by references to transactions with Chinese sellers in the diaries of Amelia Stein), she would also have been familiar with the ubiquitous exoticist and racist anti-Chinese press, popular imagery, and entertainment that flooded the region and its press.

60 racial identification and categorization, and issues of miscegenation and biological

“mixing”) in her more formal compositional work, but also in scattered correspondences, reported conversations and attitudes, and apparent personal preoccupations. In her early attempts to publicize Three Lives, for instance, she made it a point to personally send copies of the book to both Booker T. Washington and Du Bois, the two most notable

“race men” of the period, representing the main conflicted strains of black life and struggle in the U.S. Stein was often surrounded by American expatriates in Paris, maintained regular correspondence with American friends in the U.S. (to the point of exhibiting a continued sense of communal participation and belonging with certain friends, especially among some Jewish-American family and school friends in

Baltimore), kept abreast of American news and concerns, and wrote frequently on distinctly American topics throughout her life.59 It is also telling that her mammoth novel, of sorts, her self-proclaimed magnum opus, The Making of Americans, took up her family’s history in the U.S. (unstated but elsewhere noted and discussed as German-

Jewish) and, among other ontological and typological concerns, the question of being

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 59 It is well known that many of her closest writer friends and reading fans were American, and seems significant that her lifelong partner, Alice B. Toklas, was a fellow Jewish-American and Californian. She also explored “American” identity and history repeatedly, in such works as: An American and France, American Biography and Why Waste It, The Geographical History of America, Everybody’s Autobiography, Four In America, The Mother of Us All (on Susan B. Anthony), Brewsie and Willie, and numerous articles and shorter pieces. Throughout her writing career, Stein was also consistently interested in reaching an American public and gaining recognition from important American thinkers and writers. She was in constant search of willing American publishers for her work before she became famous. Her commitment to writing for the most part in English reflects not only her sense of enduring Americanness and desire to celebrate a distinctly American idiom, but also a conscious sense of self-difference and heightened awareness of the materiality and distinct sonority of the language she worked with, as separate from the everyday French she heard—a point other critics have mentioned and that she herself discusses in her (as far as I know unpublished) “An American and France” (1936).

61 American in the very terms of recognizably white middle-class assimilation.60 During and even at the end of decades of living in France, Stein always wholeheartedly identified herself as American and celebrated the U.S. as the center of modernity and modern

“twentieth-century” writing.

Stein also certainly encountered comparable, albeit differently inflected, racially hierarchical thinking and interests in early twentieth-century France. Even before this era of the heyday of its imperial power, numerous French “scientists” and much public discussion focused on questions of racial difference and hierarchy. As in the U.S. and

Britain, in France, the developing fields of ethnography and the “new field of physical anthropology provided an academic framework for delineating and documenting human difference that encouraged thinkers to present ‘scientific’ assessments of ‘inferior’ Asian and African races in a way that contrasted them with the ‘stronger’ Caucasian race’” (D.

Hale 12). Though the French defined the concept of race in varied and flexible ways according to evolving political and imperial conditions, and though they carried out ostensibly benevolent “mission civilisatrice” policies in their colonies, they also consistently “supported a hierarchy of racial and evolutionary development that placed themselves at the pinnacle” and held the view that though “Africans, Arabs, and Asians could improve through civilizing action,” essentially “only white Europeans could be truly civilized” (Hale 13). Despite nationally distinct colonizing practices, the U.S.,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 60 Though Stein edited out all the explicit indications of the Jewish background of the Hersland and Dehning families she included in her notebooks and earlier drafts, Stein’s awareness of the salient racial dynamics and stakes in her Making of Americans is clearly implicit both in her lifelong consideration of the book as her magnum opus, and her attention throughout the “novel” to the tensions and conflicts involved in American identity and “being” for especially racialized immigrant families.

62 Britain, and France thus shared core notions and representations of black, yellow, and brown racial difference as ontologically inferior, materially unsublatable, biologically determined, and always naturally subjugated to white rule, transcendent subjectivity, civilizational superiority, and guidance.

Significantly intertwined with the racial obsessions of the day, late nineteenth- century American culture was inundated with the popularization of scientific theories,

“discoveries,” and explanations of the world in the form of popular magazines, academic journals and institutions, community lectures and exhibits, museums, and widely attended world’s fairs (Rydell 5) (and similar international (“coloniale”) expositions in England and France from the mid-nineteenth century on, the earlier examples of which influenced the elaborate affairs in the U.S.). Whether Stein attended any of the extravagant West

Coast expositions of the period is uncertain, but she does write that she frequently attended plays that passed through San Francisco and Oakland, and she specifically mentions Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Queen of Chinatown, and a “Buffalo Bill” Wild West show.61 Stein also mentions that she had seen and that “everybody” was well familiar with “Buffalo Bill and the Indian attack” (257) and also that “anybody raised where everybody collected arrow heads and played Indians would notice Indians” (257).

Racially defined categories, assumptions, children’s games, perspectives, and everyday entertainment flooded Stein’s youth and world, and racially slanted thinking would inevitably solidify into a thick perceptual “veil” of sorts for Stein and her generation. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 61 In her lecture, “Plays,” Stein mentions that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was her first play, that it was “a natural thing in the Oakland and San Francisco in which [she] was brought up to see a great many plays played. . . . . a great deal of opera played” (Writings 256). The Queen of Chinatown is also mentioned as a melodrama she was familiar with (Writings 259).

63 II. The Science and Writing of the Racial Other

A key factor keeping race at the forefront of public attention, and facilitating all the contradictory hostility toward and enjoyment of invariably racialized others, during this period was, as Denise da Silva argues, the writing of race into the increasingly authoritative fields of history and science toward the end of the nineteenth century. Both in the U.S. and all over Europe the rise of the sciences and academic institutions at the end of the nineteenth century coincided with economic instabilities, increased influxes of non-Western-European immigrants, and imperial contacts that stirred up race-inflected questions of national belonging and contributed to bringing the idea of race into mainstream political and popular interest.62 While many scholars have focused on the centrality of ethnicity and heightened migration rates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the most vicious nativisms and perceptions of various “ethnicities” in the period consistently fell along racial lines and involved broader processes of racism and the racialization.63 The period’s concept of “race” as the ontologically significant,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 62 Despite pre-existing racialization and references to race in public discussion, “the rise of scientific racialism,” Matthew Jacobson indicates, as an “important epistemological shift” took place particularly “over the course of the nineteenth century” in the U.S. (32). Not only did the decades around the turn of the century usher in the takeoff of the sciences of man, or what Jacobson calls the “racializing sciences,” including anthropology and ethnology, they were also a time of growing public interest and faith in the “hard” sciences, and especially in biology, evolution, and explorations of the natural world. Increasing faith in man’s mastery in understanding and ordering the universe importantly shaped the ways in which western institutions defined non-European others in absolute incommensurable difference of mind, body, and composition of their very being as constituting some sort of bodily otherness found to be incommensurate with being itself. Faith in the epistemological powers of reason, as most developed and inhabited by Western man, and in the availability of the world to empirical observation, contributed to the ontological-grammatical rendering of the world, nature, and people as knowable objects in a global pursuit of knowledge. 63 In the United States, the nativist trends that sometimes stressed “ethnic” or “cultural” differences were consistently racially inflected. They often emphasized perceived physiognomic differences and were also

64 irreducible difference clearly shaped thought, practice, and policy beyond and apart from notions of ethnic or cultural difference. The fact that the concept of race symbolized and embodied utter incommensurability made it an influential factor in all areas of American life—in fundamental perceptions of global space; in nation building projects; in the period’s preoccupations with rationality, civilizational advancement, and “progress”; in family life and established parameters of acceptable sexuality; and in every imaginable social and political action.64 Inevitably, the very conception of race (and of humankind as both universal and racial in form) informed notions of the possibilities and limits of socio-political and textual representation and shaped and informed Stein’s writing in profound, textually engaging ways.

Though racial identity was always a shaping factor in U.S. life, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and especially in the years after Stein’s birth (1874), Euro-white supremacist views were given widespread and enthusiastically embraced “scientific” support by the most respected scholars and knowledge institutions of the period. All discussions of race became “laced with scientific racism” (Rydell 5), and “scientific” !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! largely in step with the numerous race riots and hostilities, the firm entrenchment of Jim Crow practices, and aggressive pro-imperial “civilizing” ambitions of the period, all of which variously figured whiteness as integral to the identity of the nation. 64 The U.S. was of course already thoroughly “imbued with racist ideas” before Stein’s time. From the country’s inception, celebration of the nation’s Anglo-Saxon roots and Teutonic racial superiority served as backdrop for the eventual entrenchment of the view of general white-European superiority, as is well demonstrated by Reginald Horsmand and George Fredrickson, among others. Widely endorsed among scholars in Europe, among German philologists, French naturalists, and British biologists and medical doctors alike, the notion of (especially Northern) European racial superiority naturally thrived in the U.S. and was at work in the “knowledge” production at Harvard, Stanford, and other universities across the nation. By the 1850s, Harvard had already offered a variety of courses addressing Teutonic racial superiority (Dyer 8). Arthur de Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1853) appeared in translation in 1856 and gained readership in the U.S. Later, in the 1870s, Henry Adams taught the popular “view of Teutonic superior origins” and passed such views on to his students at Harvard, one of whom, Henry Cabot Lodge, would become instrumental in pushing for anti-immigrant legislation in his later political career.

65 interest in race shaped popular culture and public conversation. The reigning public and academic discourses of the period show, as Denise da Silva has argued, that the notion of

“scientific universality” not only influences but “institutes spaces of history” (xxii).

Thomas Dyer comments that both the popular cultural environment and “intellectual ambience” of the late nineteenth century was such that “it would have been remarkable” for any youth of a Victorian relatively middle class background not to develop “a fondness for the discussion of race and race theory” (Dyer 2). Conflicted and increasingly diverse as the country was at the time, Dyer’s assessment of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. life as distinctly “racially obsessive” (5) and Oscar

Handlin’s characterization of the period as marked by “the high tide of racism” accurately capture the most broadly shared and prominent characteristics of the internally diverse nation. The American Whig Review would comment in 1849 that “ethnology

[was] the . . . . science of the age” and in 1850 that “the scientific study of humanity “ was “a topic of general and even popular interest” (Horsman 139).65

In the reading of Stein’s work it is helpful to keep in mind that from her youth and into her later years she had a penchant toward scientific and philosophical questioning that would give her a propensity to soak up all the racially inflected “science” and

“scientific” (largely race-preoccupied) popular culture of her day. Her personal interest in human typology in various senses is evident throughout her work, and it is significant

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 65 Reginald Horsman notes that in the U.S., discussions of race as innate and meaningful difference were fed by the westward-looking colonial desires and increasingly conflicted ethical dilemmas facing the Anglo-American population in the nation’s founding decades. Phrenology studies and other forms of “anthropometry” had become popular both in the U.S. and Europe in the early decades of the nineteenth century.

66 that she pursued particularly “scientific” courses of study. At the Harvard Annex, her

“major courses were in psychology, zoology and botany,” and “among her tutors were

William James, Josiah Royce, Hugo Munsterberg and George Santayana.” She even studied under Charles B. Davenport, “who was to become America’s leading Eugenicist”

(Daniel 28) before going on to medical studies at Johns Hopkins.66 All her formal intellectual pursuits, in addition to the later explorations in her writing and conversation, demonstrate the great extent to which she was shaped by a Darwinian and race-obsessed era. Stein and her contemporaries, including the future President Theodore Roosevelt, were not merely exposed to but “bombarded from early childhood with ideas which stressed the superiority of the white race and the inferiority of non-whites” (Dyer 2).

Depictions and discussions of race theories and white racial superiority filled everyday publications, including academic journals, popular magazines, newspapers, advertisements, and youth literature (Dyer 1–4). The “racial question” was not only “at the heart of scholarly discussion,” it was also the hot topic of general popular interest in a country in which nearly all areas of thought and life were given “a racial cast” (Horsman

133, 139, 46).67

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 66 Having eagerly participated in experimental studies in psychology at the Harvard Annex (Radcliffe), with specific interest in the neurological and biological aspects of the field, she went on to complete several years of medical study at Johns Hopkins before dropping out due to increasing difficulties with the required obstetrics portion of the program. Before beginning at Johns Hopkins, she also spent a summer completing a research course at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, where she was primarily involved in the extensive collection and taxonomy of sea specimens (Wineapple 112). (After years of such pursuits, it is no wonder that Stein might be interested in attempting a psychological system of all human types in Making, which she began in the early 1900s.) 67 By the 1830s, American writers expounded widely on views of innate racial differences without feeling the need for any specific scientific support; and by the 1850s, “race had become a topic of general intellectual and popular interest” (Horsman 139) and developed into a popular science. While contestations of the specific boundaries, contents, and rights attributable to the categories white and non-white came up frequently in the legal arena, (most often in numerous cases brought by individuals demanding recognition

67 Though varying “scientific” categorizations of race were in circulation by Stein’s lifetime, Georges Cuvier’s tripartite notion of the three fundamental and most “eminently distinct” divisions being those of the “white,” “yellow,” and “black” races arguably captured what were the most legally, socially, and sexually significant racial lines in the

U.S. The writings of de Gobineau, who was influential in the shaping of European racisms, were also significant in the development of nineteenth-century racial thought in the U.S.68 In addition to informing the commonly held U.S. view of three to five primary racial divisions, most respected scholars and men of science in the period, along with

Cuvier and other European natural scientists (and anthropologists), contributed to the enshrining of the biological and social sciences as the universal, definitively determining and descriptive system of human order.69 The views of Cuvier, Gobineau, Buffon, and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! as legitimately “white” on various grounds), it was universally accepted (by “natives” and foreigners, whites, blacks, yellows, and reds alike…) that racial categories such as white and non-white were scientifically/biologically determined and universally applicable. Such assumptions were common in Europe and the U.S. well before they were codified by the modern science “arsenal.” See also Saidiya Hartman, Houston Baker, Henry Yu, Priscilla Wald, David Palumbo Liu, Daniel Kim, John Kuo Wei Tchen, W.E.B. Du Bois, Daylanne English, Colleen Lye, Michael North… 68 Michael Banton attributes the particular racial thinking that characterized most popular views in the U.S. to the ideas and influence of nineteenth-century French naturalist, Georges Cuvier. Cuvier “was regarded as one of the greatest authorities” in his field and studied widely in the U.S. (Banton 48). He saw humanity as divided primarily into three distinct categories: “the ‘Caucasian,’ or white, the ‘Mongolian,’ or yellow, and the Ethiopian, or black” (quoted in Silva 106). Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, the “father of modern European racism,” and his work The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races, which came out in the United States in 1856, not only shaped racial thinking in France and Europe, but also contributed significantly to the “American school of ethnology” in the late nineteenth century (Fredrickson), informing the essentially common bases of a transatlantic, western-imperial notions of racial hierarchy and white supremacy. Gobineau’s claim that “the races of man had been separately created as distinct and unequal species” (Fredrickson 74) may not have characterized prevailing American views on the human species, but the “scientific” emphasis in his work on fundamental incommensurability among “distinct and unequal” races certainly helped to legitimate the claims of American scientists and ethnologists along such lines. 69 The crucial splitting of being first outlined in Western ontology by Descartes, Kant, and company (and cinched by Hegel’s account of Spirit, in Silva’s view) was, as Silva argues, importantly mirrored in the late nineteenth-century writing of the laws of science and man, and in the inscribing of race as scientific truth. According to Silva, Cuvier was an important contributor in this regard insofar as he helped to institute the scientific “engulfment” of the world as subject to “the science of life,” which encompassed the biological

68 other European naturalists of the nineteenth century, including Harvard-based Swiss biologist Louis Agassiz, informed and supported home-grown racial theorists in the U.S., such as Dr. Samuel George Morton, an early phrenologist who informed Nott’s views on white superiority. A widespread knowledge- and science-fetishizing climate shaped the world-encompassing extent to which the naming of racial difference as intrinsically constitutive of humanity was thoroughly naturalized and codified into indelible foundations of knowledge and notions of being as racially inflected. Lectures giving scientific explanations for white superiority were widely presented and attended from the

1850s on.70

In addition to providing scientific configurations and theories for the hierarchical mapping of humankind, popular science, and national policy, popular Darwinism, and the increasingly god-like figure of Darwin himself, further naturalized and developed inherited notions of European exceptionality as informing even their biological makeup

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! world “constituted by self-moving “ things, the human counterpart to the “world of things” (Silva 102), governed by the laws of physics. Cuvier not only explained living things according to a natural order established by universal law, but also contributed to “the deployment of the Enlightenment idea of ‘progress,’” of development toward perfection in the realm of biology, where specimens of the science of life were classifiable according to their “degree of differentiation, specialization, and complexity. . . . that is, their degree of perfection” (104). Freedom from excessive materiality and exemption from the determining-force of the universe would render “civilized” man, with the most “highly developed mental functions” a superior ruling being over the rest of nature and humanity as entirely “affectable” (Silva 105- 106). European man’s special formal unity with the creative-productive force of Reason/Spirit/Being, would endow him with freedom from exterior-ruling nomos, of which merely “affectable,” otherly racial beings are mere objects. Locating the key attributions of both biological and spiritual/moral perfection in the white European (and Euro-American) body would decisively write the European liberal subject into a dominant position of exceptional transcendence over the merely material. While all of nature was thoroughly appropriated for scientific and social study, the European subject was inscribed into a privileged position as the knower, namer, and determiner of scientific truth by virtue of their putatively distinctive capacity to rise above material objectification to the formally universal position of representative citizen and scientist. 70 Dr. Josiah Nott, for instance, spoke frequently on race and was recognized “as a leading scientist,” though probably due more to the “racial preconceptions of his audience” rather than the actual “quality of his research” (Fredrickson 79).

69 and as transcendent of other natural determination. Silva points out in her study that

Darwin importantly built upon and carried on the notion of European racial superiority as an unquestionable given of nature. Unlike Cuvier, who situated the human race alongside the rest of natural Life, Darwin importantly excluded Europe from the general realm of physical determination and assumed “the ruling principle of transcendentality” for the European subject, which “had already taken hold of modern thought” (Silva 111).

Darwin reinstitutes, within the field of science, European racial particularity as free from the outer determinations of natural law:

Always already a self-determined thing, in Darwin’s version of productive nomos the “civilized man” remains . . . . fully in the scene of representation, from whence he defies the regulative and productive force of nature, beyond the means of “natural selection.” He alone is self-producing; he alone enjoys the ability of self-perfection. (Silva 111)

As Silva suggests, it is this key moment in the scientific naming of European superiority coupled with this “writing of man as an effect of scientific signification, as a natural thing” (113) that constitutes what is perhaps Darwin’s greatest contribution to the scientific and historic naturalization of race and racisms in a global context. The era- defining scientist thus confirmed the innate, natural superiority of European constitution in contradistinction to the rest of the natural world, of which non-European beings and bodies were a part and thus thoroughly biologically determined, as “affectable” objects of nature.71

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 71 Darwin’s exposition of natural law and empirically “objective” biological studies took for granted, confirmed, and further scientifically authorized non-Europeans’ location in a realm of being entirely distinct from true human “freedom” and rational self-determination. Regardless of varying, particular race categories and designations, the theory of evolution informed the general notion of race as the non- European, unfree, mark of “unsublatable,” and unrepresentable (therefore never universal and always particularly slanted), material excess.

70 Articulations of modernity and civilizational advancement in Stein’s lifetime were inextricably tied to the concomitant evolution craze and the popularization of Darwin’s work in the natural sciences, which always inevitably involved and confirmed the givenness of the racial exceptionality of white-Europeans and Euro-Americans.72

Popular interest in Darwin, with some even dubbing the U.S. at the time as “the

Darwinian country” (Newman 29), was inseparable from interest in racial “progress” and teleological justifications for hierarchical and imperialist racial systems. Dyer remarks that these decades of Stein’s life, from the 1870s through 1919, “coincided with the zenith of racist thought” in the U.S. (Dyer 21). Widespread public discussion of Darwin and evolution inherently evoked the notion of racial fitness. Though they countered notions of permanent biological difference among races, theories of evolution provided

“scientific” grounds for the attribution of differential rates of development to different races and helped to scientifically explain “the conjunction of dark skin, primitiveness, and a position on the evolutionary scale relatively closer to the animals” (Martin 46).73 In all the terminology and commentary of the age, the indelibility and inherent meaningfulness of race was taken for granted and seen as reflective of superior national character. The linking of domestic color lines, growing scientificism, white racial !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 72 A degree of familiarity with Darwin’s theories was quite common among Americans in the Post-Civil War era of Stein’s years in the U.S. and logically informed the growth of popular racial “science” that pervaded American culture in the late decades of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century (Fredrickson 244, Dyer 1). 73 Citing historians Nancy Leys Stepan and Sander Gilman, Louise Newman further corroborates that the period spanning much of Stein’s lifetime, from 1870 to 1920, was specifically one in which evolutionary theory became part of popular cultural discourse and “became both more specialized and authoritative as a cultural resource and language of interpretation” for explaining all manner of biological and cultural differences (29). Across academic disciplines and in popular usage, descriptions of racial identity and character included references to good racial “stock,” superior ancestral “strains,” and the possession of certain racial “blood” (Dyer 24-25, 84, 89; Horsman 61, 301; Newman 132; Sinkler 22).

71 superiority, and imperial ambition came together in the impressively grand form of the many national and world expositions in the latter half of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century (especially in the U.S., France, and England).74

Along with Darwin’s theories on evolutionary biology, Herbert Spencer’s theories of “social Darwinism” gained immense popularity with the American public at this time.

In his study on the development of American anthropology, Ronald Martin comments that Herbert Spencer was “the Victorian age philosopher with by far the greatest impact on American culture” (36). While Spencer characterized the “primitive” not as a specific people or race but as “a universal evolutionary stage,” his explanations of evolutionary progress and discrepant development served both to justify America’s “imperialistically- inclined culture” abroad (Martin 37) and call attention to the importance of racial reproduction guidelines at home. The “widely accepted” notions that “both intelligence and traits of character tend to be inherited” served well to establish one of the many

“proofs” of moral and intellectual discrepancies along racial lines (Gossett 158). The periodical, Popular Science Monthly, was just one of the public forums for particularly

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 74 These monumental events contributed to the “popularization of evolutionary ideas about race and progress” and specifically linked scientifically legitimized notions of racial superiority to imperial domination (Rydell 5). In fact, one of the principal stated aims of the extravagant Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 was to educate the public on evolutionary race theories and provide a live, “illustrated encyclopedia of civilization” (Rydell 40, 45). One of the organizing staff for the exposition, G. Browne Goode, had studied under Agassiz at Harvard and helped to shape the comparative ethnological racial and ethnological element of the event (Rydell 45). And Smithsonian curator for the Bureau of American Ethnology, Otis T. Mason, claimed that the Columbian Exposition was “one vast anthropological revelation” (Rydell 55). At the 1893 Columbian Exposition as well as in other numerous expositions held across the country, including large-scale ones in Omaha, Atlanta, New Orleans, Buffalo, St. Louis, and along the West Coast, various races and peoples of the world were displayed as specimens to visually demonstrate a “vital development from low toward the high” among the races, with the white race at the pinnacle of development and civilization (Rydell 127-236).

72 race-inflected “scientific “ discussions.75 Not surprisingly, Spencer’s popularity, and popular interpretations of Darwin, contributed to eugenicist ideas which arose earlier in the nineteenth century and grew to immense popularity throughout the 1880s, 90s, and the 1900s (Dyer 14, Rydell 5, Gossett 369, Newman).

In addition to the success of Popular Science in these years, another indicator of the general public’s interest in questions of human biology, heredity, and racial ancestry could be seen in the notable boom of interest in genealogical research at the end of the nineteenth century. Specifically race-sensitive and race-tracing study of family background became a national pastime of sorts, as Americans searched en masse for biologically superior family histories.76 Stein’s detailed attention to her family’s own

German-Jewish immigrant history, especially in The Making of Americans (though she eventually edited out explicit references to the family’s Jewishness) comes out from and cannot but be inflected by this thoroughly race-saturated, genealogy-fetishizing environment.77 She also made frequent references to national, regional, ethnic, and racial origins throughout her writings. And the ubiquitous passing mentions of Jews, Jewish- related language, or the reflections of her “tribe” in her own character (which become !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 75 In fact, the magazine was founded in the 1870s, by Edward Livingston Youmans, specifically “to help disseminate Spencer’s work” in the U.S. (Newman 29). And Spencer’s work was thoroughly bound up with studies of racial difference and degeneration. 76 In 1874, an editor for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine remarked that the “origin of race” in one’s family history was a topic of “greater interest to the student than almost any other problem. And Even the young, future president Theodore Roosevelt, who wholeheartedly believed in both “Anglo-Saxon” superiority and the dominance of a distinctly American mixture of white European races, would include family genealogical research among his interests (Dyer 9). Historian Thomas Gossett cites a professor at the University of Vermont, who reported in 1886 that “If there is one thing more than another about which the American of the present day is concerned. . . . it is his ancestry” (158). And well into the twentieth century, librarians across the United States were frequently solicited for help in genealogical searches for “evidence of distinguished ancestry” (Gossett 159). 77 See Wineapple 183, 186.

73 obvious upon the reading of much of her less discussed writings), demonstrate her sharing in the popular fixations on racial and ancestral background.

Though she most likely had less positivist tendencies than many of her contemporaries, given the inextricable interconnectedness between interest in Darwinian evolution and racial obsessions in her time, Stein’s repeated identification with an era defined by evolution and biology interests, in addition to her numerous explicit allusions to the racial (and alongside her obvious interests in national, ethnic, and racial types and study in human typology, biology, psychology), implies the grounding of her own racial thinking in notions of natural difference shaped by the context of thoroughly racialized social, scientific, and academic spheres. Stein wrote in 1938 that Darwin was “the great man of the period that framed [her] youth” (Letter to Robert Bartlett Haas, quoted

Wineapple 61).78 She further comments that anyone who “came out of the nineteenth century” (as she had) inevitably “had to be interested in evolution and biology” (272).

Historian George Sinkler has noted that the “one dominant theme in the racial literature” from the mid-nineteenth century on, and the “one racial belief held in

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 78 And commenting on the pervasiveness of popular interest in science and evolution, she writes in her later work, Everybody’s Autobiography, “I began then when evolution was still exciting very exciting,” when science “meant everything and any one who had an active mind could complete mechanics and evolution” (250). Attesting to the general popularity and public accessibility to Darwin’s work across the country and even in Stein’s own hometown during her youth, an article in an issue of the Oakland Daily Evening Tribune from June 1881 (when Stein was seven years old) noted that a “Lecture on Darwin and Darwinism” given by one Dr. Stebbins constituted “a mental feast” and was “heard by a good audience, keenly attentive, and highly pleased” (ODET June 9, 1881). Stein highlights again the memorable quality and formative significance throughout her early years in such an environment when she remarks, regarding her later loaning of Darwin’s Descent of Man to a friend, that in contrast, during the 1930s, “Darwin was not so near,” unlike “he had been when [she] began knowing everything” as a youth in California (EA 250). Both in Oakland’s and San Francisco’s local cultures during Stein’s childhood and teen years in California, through the 1880s and early 1890s, and the academic environments she entered on the East Coast, Darwinian thought and its associated racial hierarchies were apparently profoundly influential and culturally defining.

74 common” in the U.S. of Stein’s youth and lifetime was the idea of God-given “inherent racial differences” (Sinkler 19). In ethical terms, such beliefs were simply necessary for the justification of U.S. and European imperial projects.79 State racial policies in both the

U.S. and Europe evolved within the context of this fundamental “externalization of difference,” as David Goldberg has put it (31), from the moment of inception of the modern nation-state and the “racial.” Popularly adapted interpretations of the theories of

Darwin and Spencer in both officially eugenicist and other popularly racist discourses were used to define national character, helping to justify U.S. imperial projects on the continent and abroad while feeding racial anxieties among whites in the U.S. In addition to providing “evidence” of white superiority for multiple nationalist and imperialist agendas, such discourses also normalized and occluded pervasive structures of white privilege and dominance, maintaining restrictive ontological and epistemological limits to even the most humanist, egalitarian, and reformist thinking.

Such conceptual constraints defined the growing fields of anthropology and ethnology and also affected the most progressive social scientists during this time, including Franz Boas, for instance, who did not question the fundamental racial distinction between whites and non-whites.80 As Matthew Frye Jacobson comments, and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 79 In the U.S., colonization and eventual extermination of Native Americans (the major national imperial project throughout the nineteenth century) called for theories of white superiority that specifically cited a moral and spiritual deficiency among both Indians and Mexicans as justification for white dominance from the country’s inception. For instance, while political clashes with England ultimately gave way to the overall “feeling of ‘racial’ unity with the English” (quoted in Horsman 115), the ideological differences of populations in the Americas were seen as signs of innate spiritual lack attributable to racial and ontological difference. (Horsman 115). 80 Boas, for instance, though he attempted to challenge racist and ethnocentric approaches to anthropology, refuting ideas of absolute racial permanence and emphasizing the environmental and social factors in racial character, also took for granted the division of humankind into types. Boas pioneered and promoted

75 as Silva also notes, most of the good-willed “antiracist work of the period was founded upon the very epistemology of race that it sought to dismantle” (103). Even Mary

Roberts Smith Coolidge, who wrote on the Chinese from a relatively benevolent, diplomatic perspective, attempting accurate and appreciative accounts of Chinese immigrants, adhered to reigning notions of natural race hierarchies and the applicability of evolutionary theories to nonwhites’ biological determination and position as affectable

(and observable) bodies in nature. She would specifically cite their abilities to assimilate as evidence that they “occupied a higher place on the evolutionary hierarchy than most whites believed” (Newman 153). Anthropological and ethnological studies of the period attributed commensurability (and translatability), simple understandability, and intriguing otherness to their objects of study, while taking for granted the rational, civilizationally advanced, and ontoepistemologically privileged capacity of the West.81

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! notions of “cultural relativism” (Martin 168), tending to challenge his American audience’s “regnant notions of race” and “their own sense of cultural superiority” with his attacks on notions of racial purity and ethnocentricity (Martin 174). His influential work, The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), however, both capitalized on the massive popularity of the primitive during the period as a “lure for readers of that time” (Martin 172) and took for granted existing racial color categories and notions of the primitive as natural and objective. Boas assumed that the “Negro” and the “East Asiatic” could “at once be recognized by his bodily build” (15), and in his study of the U.S. black population in contradistinction to“ full-blood Negroes,” he casually referenced the “free intermingling of slave owners with their female slaves” rather than citing any systemic racial violence (15). Given his relatively progressive stance, it is thus a significant sign of the epistemological context of his times that he also emphasized that “Whites” and “Negroes” were “fundamentally distinct (Boas 4) and took for granted that “great men” could be found primarily within “the white race” (Martin 180). Ruth Benedict, a student of Boas who would, like him, in turn endorse a culturally relativistic view of different races and groups, and who had a relatively “benevolent” curiosity in Asians and others, also took for granted the givenness of the world’s division into the “tricolored regions for ‘Caucasian,’ ‘Mongoloid,’ and ‘Negroid’ areas’” in her Races of Mankind (Jacobson 103). Much like Margaret Mead (Coming of Age in Samoa 1928), another Boas student, Benedict took for granted both the epistemological authority and transcendence of the western, white scholar, and the globally accessible and (culturally) consumable objecthood of nonwhite cultures and races, such as the Japanese in her study The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946). 81 As Ronald Martin notes, though American culture and anthropology from the 1880s through the 1930s showed some limited reconfiguration of notions of the primitive during the period, perceptions and “languages of difference” marked by enduring racialized notions of the primitive and white superiority

76 Such dominant views of race, and the naturalizing of black and Asian racial difference (and inferiority) especially, were importantly authorized by Robert E. Park, arguably the leading sociologist (especially on race) of the period. In keeping with the conclusions of the Supreme Court and popular opinion, Park would give the stamp of academic institutional authority to the designation of Afro-Americans and Asians as essentially non-white and intrinsically non-American. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Park was “widely recognized as the foremost white student of race relations” (Kim 70). A relatively progressive figure in the academic transition from primarily “biological” to a more “cultural” point of view in approaches to race, Park nevertheless maintained “a residual belief in the genetic bases of racial difference” and felt that white antipathy toward blacks and Asians was inevitable and natural (Kim 70).

He endorsed the view of racially marked populations as bearing permanent and irreducible physical marks by which they could “infallibly be identified,” and that prevented them from assimilating into the “American mainstream”(Kim 76).82 Park’s views both reflected and scientifically confirmed popular white attitudes toward race as a !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! pervaded the thinking and preoccupations of Americans regardless of slight revisions or shifts in academic circles. Although Boasians and the “literary modernists” Martin discusses, including Faulkner and Hurston, were indeed “forward-looking and innovative” in their approaches to “the Other,” it does not seem to be the case, as Martin would claim, that they helped to achieve significant “marginalization of the notions of race and the primitive” (265). Martin also explains that an alternative figuring of the primitive as not merely past or undeveloped but as “deep,” “elemental,” or “essential” (91) in the writings of Sir James Frazer, Freud, and Jung also shifted perspectives somewhat in this period, while maintaining white westerners at the apex of civilization and self-mastery (91-92, 103-119). The repositioning of the primitive as internal to and present in the unconscious of the “civilized” involved the suggestion of a “psychic unity” among all humankind (110) and contributed to a renegotiation of the temporal distance or spatial externality of difference. But Freud and others still considered the “civilized self” of the West, though conflicted and more elementally related to “the primitive Other” than previously thought, as more advanced and less enslaved to primal instincts and appetites (119). 82 For Park, the “high visibility” of blacks and Asians was problematic and prevented full assimilation. He claimed that it is when “a race bears an external mark by which every individual member of it can infallibly be identified,” that inevitably “that race is by fact set apart and segregated” (quoted on Kim 76).

77 clearly readable, referential, and essential reality. His racial thinking was characteristic of a society that could not but conceive of race as given biological, epidermal, and sociological fact.

In a statement that has been widely quoted, Park described his view of this element of irreducible otherness in the raced body, in ways that figure race as always outside the formal definitions of human being and globality (as discussed by Silva and

Moten), such that the non-white body would come to bear the irrational, unorderable, and always excessive trace of materiality that

. . . . the only immigrants who have successfully assimilated in the American mainstream—namely those of European descent—have done so through a physical self-refashioning as well as a mental one. Assimilation entails not only a “a more or less complete adoption by the members of the smaller groups of the language, technique, and mores of the larger and more inclusive ones,” it also demands the “era[sure of] the external signs which formerly distinguished the members of one race from those of another” (757). Thus we find that “[i]n America it has become proverbial that a Pole, a Lithuanian, or Norwegian cannot be distinguished, in the second generation, from an American born of native parents” (757). Immigrants of European descent are able to overcome the natural racial antipathy to which white Americans—like all human subjects—are prone because they are able to make themselves talk, think, and look like white Americans. (Quoted Kim 77)

Park emphasizes the distinctions of immutable racial physicality of blacks and Asians over and against the effective dissolution of the less significant cultural differences of

European groups. His specification of the insolubility of non-Europeans in the nation is attributed to the fact that they are “simply unable to refashion themselves physically as

American subjects” (Kim 77). And the setting apart of black and Asian bodies here is telling of the primary color conflicts and attitudes of his time:

[T]he chief obstacle to the assimilation of the Negro and the Oriental are not mental but physical traits. It is not because the Negro and the Japanese are so

78 differently constituted that they do not assimilate. . . . the Japanese are quite as capable as the Italians, the Armenians, or the Slavs of acquiring our culture and sharing our national ideals. The trouble is not with the Japanese mind but with the Japanese skin. The Jap is not the right color. (760) (Kim 77)

For Park and his contemporaries, it was a distinct racial-physical, unequivocally constitutive and signifying, epidermal and ultimately ontological particularity that could not be overcome that “naturally” kept blacks and Asians in perpetual conflict with the mainstream of American society.

Alongside the scientificization of racism in the U.S., the rise of the sciences of man in Stein’s early twentieth-century France also thrived during this period and proved key in aiding the nation to construct an image of national and racial eminence that would match the imperial status of its European competitors. According to Susan Bayly, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in France saw the rise of French anthropology, ethnological studies, and intense French pursuits especially in exploiting French

Indochina and other colonies as sources of new “material.” Focused attempts to maintain and expand their colonial conquests throughout the early twentieth century and contrastive comparisons with colored colonials served to buttress such theories. Bayly notes that France’s own version of a dynamically mixed but always distinctly white racial identity involved notions of original identification with and rootedness in “ancestral terrain or terroir” (586), and also that the French tended to characterize themselves as embodying the ideal “union of the best elements of at least two ‘vigorous’ and ethnologically advanced European racial ‘types’: the Celt and the Latin” (90).

Though distinctly inflected local and national vocabularies and racial policies varied, the various parts of Stein’s Euro-American and French-European world shared

79 white supremacist and hierarchical assumptions regarding race. The racial sciences were as popular, if not more, in France throughout the nineteenth century, and, as discussed above, influential racial theories in the U.S. were often linked to the work of French or

British naturalists.83 As Christina Firpo has indicated, conflicting and involved discourses of race in France employed pseudo-“science-based” theories regarding “racial blood” and “mixed race,” and informed attempts to subjugate and absorb colonized populations (593).84 In the French métropole, the ethnographic sciences were further institutionalized in establishments such as the Institut d’Ethnologie (founded in 1926) and the Musée de l’Homme (founded in 1937) (Bayly 582). And as racial theories from

Europe infused nineteenth-century American thought and ethnological studies, around the turn of the century and into the early decades of the twentieth, distinctly American versions of racist caricature were likewise spread throughout both Britain and France through American products, film, and other media.85

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 83 Cuvier and Gobineau, mentioned above for instance, were French of course and decisively influential in American racial thought. And apart from immense interest in the racial sciences, Paris was also the center of many forms of Orientalism, exoticism and primitivism throughout the nineteenth century. 84 Firpo mentions that colonial policies in Indochina involved attempts to promote and expand a French- educated, mixed “Eurasian” race among the colonized, for the purpose of forming a buffer population to serve as an administrative pro-France class to help squelch indigenous uprising (592–94). 85 Dana Hale has explained that certain caricatures of black bodies and racist trends in branding (such as in Alexandre Ranneau’s “Nigger Brand” products (trademarks from 1922 and 1937) were popularized in France most likely from American sources and products in France. Robert Rydell has also discussed the spread across Europe of American cultural influence through the traveling Wild West shows, and Ann Ardis has noted the influence of early American film in Europe.

80 III. Color Lines: “What is Seen,” and “Using Everything”

Around the turn of the century, in Stein’s U.S. and global context, global-racial imperial cultures and perspectives that were authorized by the scientific and academic communities on both sides of the Atlantic were prominently relevant in current events and across public discourse as the U.S. aggressively extended its imperial control and civilizing mission to Pacific and Asian territories, and as France busily and brutally solidified its control of Asian and African colonies. Both in the political/public sphere and in all forms of media, culture, and popular entertainment, images of racial hierarchy, empire, and caricatures of exotic or colored bodies infused every part of life. The cultural apparatuses that accompanied the institutionalization of the sciences of man during this time celebrated and disseminated the racialist views authorized by the growing fields of anthropology and ethnology. While each nation and region varied in particular articulations of race, empire, and national identity, in the U.S., as well as in

Stein’s resident France and throughout the imperial West, shared forms of print culture, cinema, exoticist artifact exhibitions, and Orientalist and primitivist branding of consumer products all ubiquitously heralded a supranational white (Euro-/Euro-

American) western racial superiority, especially over and against “black,” “yellow,” and also “red” and “brown” bodies and continents. The overwhelming racial saturation of

Stein’s social and cultural environment, both in the States of her youth and her adopted home of France later as a writer, helps to explain and insistently, though obliquely, resonates with the numerous recurring, unconventional articulations of race in her

81 writing, which I will discuss in following chapters. Considering just how inescapably salient race was in the very construction of Stein’s civilized, “twentieth-century” modernity, such that race profoundly inflected and was often explicitly invoked in every aspect of life and so many everyday objects may help to contextualize and explain many ways in which race irrupts in and infuses Stein’s writing so often beyond the texts that are seen as referentially about race (in the way that a work like Three Lives appears to be).

For this reason, it may be helpful to further outline the thorough and profound extent to which images and questions of race pervaded so many aspects of Stein’s life and world.

Through the late 1800s and 1900s, world expositions in the U.S. and abroad specifically aimed to “show racial evolution and hierarchy,” to popularize racial and ethnological “findings,” and celebrate growing imperial glory, U.S. domination over the

Pacific and Asia, and all the western nations’ colonial trophies.86 Prevailing racist sentiment and paradigms at this time reflected unabashedly Euro-centric ontologies and policies.87 With both American and European powers heavily invested in establishing

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 86 In the U.S., most of the fairs featured miniature renditions of Chinese and Japanese villages (Rydell 108, 228) (with live, “authentic” Orientals); some replicas of villages in the Philippines showed “American flags everywhere” and occupying “American soldiers in display along with Filipinos” (Rydell 129). In Europe and in the U.S., governments, scientists, and anthropologists were eager to display clear racial progress and superiority (Rydell 55-64), wanting to propagate “scientific racism” in order to solidify national unity and legitimate the existing order (Rydell 237). In San Francisco, plans for a colossal fair to celebrate the opening of the Panama canal began when construction started in 1904, ten years before the actual opening. Theodore Roosevelt strongly endorsed the canal primarily out of concern for naval access to the Pacific and Asia, which was seen as essential to securing U.S. dominance over Asia. (Rydell 222). In shaping the central ideas for the fair, the San Francisco directors “relied less on anthropologists than on eugenicists themselves” and focused on representing the “three . . . . main races, the White, the Yellow-Brown, and the Black” (Rydell 222-23). 87 A statement from then Vice President of the U.S. in 1905, at one of the many West Coast fairs celebrating the “American Pacific,” indicates the ontological and ethical assumptions of western whiteness as superiorly transcendent universality. In celebration of the U.S.’s movement toward increasing influence over the “Orient” (Rydell 203), Vice President Charles Fairbanks announced at the Portland fair:

82 imperial control and trade dominance in East and Southeast Asia in this period, the ever- present figuration of the Oriental as distinctly non-absorbable and non-universal, as more beastly (or machine-like) than human,88 thrived and even exploded in Stein’s everyday surroundings. By the time Stein reached young adulthood (in the final decade of the nineteenth century), the distinction of the black and yellow races as particularly non- absorbable by the national body was prevalent “common sense” “knowledge.”89 Not

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Yonder is Hawaii, acquired for strategic purposes and. . . . expanding commerce. Lying in the waters of the Orient are the Philippines which fell to us by the inexorable logic of a humane and righteous war. We must not underrate the commercial opportunities which invite us to the Orient. (Rydell 185) The very capacity to view violent, murderous colonial takeover of non-western regions as “humane and righteous war” according to some universally rational and reliable “logic” demonstrates the extent to which racial parameters were written into the very notions of universal humanity, objective rationality, and liberal-democratic representational equality. As with all European imperialisms, the presumption of essential incommensurate otherness of the black and yellow (—and red) body in particular was central in endowing the white body with exclusive, exceptional transcendent and democratically representative capacity. See Fredrickson, Goldberg, Guterl, Higham, Jacobson, Lloyd, Lowe, Lye, Pfister, Rydell, Saxton, Schueller, and Silva. In her history of U.S. Orientalism, Malini Johar Schueller provides numerous examples of the ways in which the sense of a racial destiny in relation to the Orient fundamentally shaped the idea of the nation as a growing independent and civilizing power, both across the continent and into the Orient. According to Schueller, An important way in which U.S. nationhood in the nineteenth century defined itself was through imaginative control over various Orients, positioned divergently through different historical and ideological contexts: the moral war against the so-called Barbary States; the missionary fervor to head the Western race to save the Orientals; the imperial-hermeneutic imperative (shared by the British and the French) to decipher the real Orient; the desire to fulfill Columbus’s original mission to “find” the Orient; and the conception of nation as the latest westerly empire (a continuation of the medieval Translatio Imperii), destined for expansion. (viii) 88 While characterization as “savage” beasts or wild animals informed racist stereotypes of blacks and Afro-Americans, Asians in America (the Chinese in particular at the turn of the century) were dehumanized both as beastly (as rat-eaters or rat-like in particular, as Josephine Lee, Robert G. Lee, John Kuo Wei Tchen, and others have shown) or as efficient machines (as noted by Colleen Lye and Sianne Ngai for instance). 89 The prospects of annexation of the Philippines in the late nineteenth century, for instance, provoked racism-based opposition nation-wide. There were claims that the “two races. . . . cannot mix or mingle”; and Senator John W. Daniel of Virginia compared the potential “Oriental” problem to the “problem” of the country’s “Negro population”: “The interjection of a race non-assimilable with the American people has been the fly in the ointment of American institutions, of American peace, of American history” (306). In California, one resident remarked that the mixed child of a Japanese man and a white woman was “the germ of the mightiest problem that ever faced this state,” a race “problem” that would “make the black problem of the South look white” (Millis 274). It was claimed that the Chinese in California were “like the negroes” except for the fact that while the “number of negroes in the country [was] fixed, . . . . the number

83 only in ubiquitous everyday images of racial caricature, but also in these numerous, elaborately staged international expositions, racialized and distinctly exoticized images of

Africans and Asians were kept ever before the Western gaze as demonstrations of

“authentic” Otherness and as empirical, visual evidence of apparently indisputable, natural, and “real” racial inferiority.

While some Americans considered Irish American, Southern Europeans, and other non-“Nordic” groups inferior to those of Anglo- and Northern Euro-American stock, many, like Theodore Roosevelt, viewed Europeans of any origin as essentially white, assimilable into the Euro-American family, and distinctly superior to “Orientals” and “Negroes.”90 Blacks were arguably the focus of the most intense and violent hostility in the U.S., but the notable intensity of anti-Asian racial sentiment is evident in that the least Asian presence in many areas prompted the sprouting of violent “Asiatic Exclusion” or “Anti-Chinese” leagues and cries that the nation was being invaded by “dangerously inferior blood” (Higham 166). Many throughout this period consistently compared the undesirability of an Asian “invasion” to the unfortunate “problem” that the nation already had with its black population and the South.91 Though the American racial landscape is

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! of Chinese [could] be increased indefinitely” (U.S. Senate Report 289). Even more problematically, Asians were viewed as culturally hostile and foreign, “antipodes in every sense” and “opposites in almost everything” in relation to the native white American. One witness before the Senate Committee on the Chinese question claimed, “Like wine and water we will never mix. . . . In a free country there cannot well exist two different classes or races of people possessing a different brain capacity” (U.S. Senate Report 1054). 90 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Colleen Lye, Robert Lee, and others have discussed the ways in which ethnicized Euro-American immigrants profited from a strategic distancing from racialized “Chinese,” “Orientals,” and Afro-Americans. 91 Stein’s family and others of Jewish-immigrant origin would have felt the tangible benefits of these attitudes. Though they were probably still subject to the everyday anti-Semitism of non-Jewish whites in the area, along with the Irish, they undoubtedly benefited from the intense vilification and hypervisibility of

84 often spoken of in black-and-white terms, blackness and Orientalness (and of course

Indian “savage” nature) served as key foils to Euro-American whiteness in the national narrative of racial superiority.92 American “righteousness, morality, energy, and vibrancy” were often held up against “Oriental corruption, deviance, lassitude, and passivity” (Schueller ix). Fraught with internal racial crisis and contradiction, the assertion of the U.S. as an imperial power was “dependent upon the cathected Orient it sought to control, and fraught with raced and gendered anxieties,” in which the Oriental played a key role (Schueller ix).93

As Mari Yoshihara has shown in her study on American Orientalism, white women of Stein’s class, including those of ethnicized and somewhat racialized European background (those with the most at stake in the intensely race-invested project of the

“making of Americans”) were key, active participants of the construction and consumption of the Orient in relation to civilized American and European whiteness.

Racism toward Asians manifested itself in forms distinct from mere subjugation. While

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! the Chinese, Orientals, and blacks in general. Ava Kahn and Marc Dollinger have noted how exceptionally and easily integrated Jews were early on in Californian life in particular; and Roger Daniels, Tomas Almaguer, and others have discussed how this West Coast phenomenon was linked to the intensity of Californians’ collective hostility toward Asians in particular. 92 Schueller and other historians have pointed out the fact that the very notion of Manifest Destiny and U.S. continental expansion was always inextricably bound up with the notion of domination in the Pacific and strategic access to the Orient. One 1780 poem by Timothy Dwight celebrated the nation’s glory by citing Asia as the site merely of the beginnings of civilization (having subsequently fallen into barbarity), and thus useful simply as sources of raw material for the superiorly advanced West (Schueller 2-3). 93 Schueller characterizes American culture throughout the nineteenth century as a purposeful “race to the Orient,” a competition in areas concerning business, scholarship, ethnography, and power struggles with European imperial forces (Schueller 23). Schueller further mentions that throughout the nineteenth century, the U.S. sent increasing numbers of missionaries and ethnographers to Asia (41-43) and that the work of quintessential American literati figures, such as Emerson and Whitman, rather than being “insular” importantly used the Orient as symbolic of the outside to the nation and as part of “a very distant past” (181).

85 they were animalized and dehumanized in figures at times similar to the racist caricatures of Afro-Americans,94 the multifaceted racism of Western Orientalisms, discussed further below, involved not only the denigration of Asian bodies and culture, but also the exoticizing appreciation and consumption of Oriental arts.95 As I will discuss elsewhere, the Steins, the Stein-Toklas household, and Stein’s writing openly participated in and actively displayed such cultivated consumption of the Orient and the Oriental.

Given Stein’s history of Oriental relations, with her youth being steeped in the

Chinese-hating environment of Northern California, and her adulthood spent in a France intensely invested in the promotion of its prized Indochinese colonies, it is no wonder that the Oriental other appears so prominently in her writing. Asians and blacks were both integral to the construction of American whiteness, but given Stein’s particular history as a Californian and an expatriate in France, the Asian dimension of the Euro-

American racial dynamic is particularly significant. Stein would have been much more exposed to anti-Chinese racism and imperial Orientalisms than non-West-Coast

Americans. All this (and her marginal position as a Jewish-American—which later involved a limited cultural identification with the Orient) seems to have contributed to the fact that Stein’s notion of American racial identity and whiteness went beyond the commonly simplified black and white divide and included an attention to the “yellow” and the complications of indeterminate shades of yellow and white that included the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 94 See Iris Chang, Robert Lee, Yuko Matsukawa, Krystyn Moon, and John Kuo Wei Tchen. 95 Whether despised as rat-like rat-eaters, decried as lascivious beasts endangering young white American girls, valued as workers with machine-like efficiency and dexterity, or viewed as producers of charming ornamental objects, all American and generally Western attitudes toward the “Oriental” highlighted their existence for and usefulness to the West. As such, highly exoticized and racially othered Asian bodies served as key contributors to notions of white Western cultural and ontological superiority.

86 place of both the (somewhat civilized but inferior) yellow chinaman and the (somewhat

“elevated” but still “black”) “high yaller” mixed race “mulatto.”96

Stein’s views on race were variously inflected, and she was characteristically unsystematic in her racial attitudes. Though her writing seems to interestingly deconstruct the prevailing view of race as stable, representable and natural difference, many of her words and actions mark her acceptance of and complicity with standard notions and representations of race. It seems, for instance, that her somewhat limited interactions with Afro-Americans were highly circumscribed, framed by Southern and also generally American racist structures in Baltimore,97 and later largely mediated by the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 96 I will not go into the already extensively discussed and studied prevalence of the anti-black racist imagery and violence that flooded Stein’s world. Of course, even with the intensity of the related anti- Asian and anti-immigrant forms of white supremacism across the U.S. in these years, arguably the most vilified racial otherness was figured in the image of the black body. Jim Crow segregation was legally reinforced in the Plessy vs Ferguson ruling of 1896, just before Stein was to begin her medical studies at John Hopkins. Stein has mentioned her (highly circumscribed) exposure to the black communities of Baltimore (in the context of the stark racial divisions characteristic of the South) and the lasting impressions such visits left on her; she also happened to be a resident of the South in the decade which saw the peak and rise of lynching. As historian Robert Wiebe has commented, despite other fluctuations in race perceptions, no white American in Stein’s lifetime ever doubted “the Negro’s proper place” in the country’s racial hierarchy (Wiebe 58). The animalized stereotype of blacks varied slightly in Western European nations, but always consistently cast blacks and the entire African continent as stagnantly primitive and less than human. Nationwide, virulently intense anti-black and pro-white sentiment unified otherwise disparate communities and classes throughout the early nineteenth and late twentieth centuries, and especially in the years spanning Stein’s final years in the US and early writing in France. Along with other historians, Amy Wood has noted that lynching in the U.S., “predominantly southern,” peaked “from the 1890s through the first decade of the twentieth century” (3). The heated outrage induced especially by the thought of interracial sexual relations and racial intermarriage permeated social life and standards, public discourse, advertisements, political and legislative discourse, and arguably shaped popular culture and entertainment in these decades more than any other single issue. 97 Stein cites this exposure to black life in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Karin Cope (along with other Stein scholars) also notes that Stein had become somewhat familiar with black life in and around Baltimore: “Stein lived for a time with her mother’s family in a wealthy Jewish quarter of Baltimore (there were all sorts of segregations in force in Baltimore until well into the twentieth century). There, as in other non-black neighborhoods in the city, until the passage of the Federal Civil Rights Housing in the 1960s, black people lived in the interstices and back laneways of the major streets and did a good deal of heavy and domestic labor. Stein would probably not have been unacquainted with individual African Americans, nor would she have been unfamiliar with various black neighborhoods, particularly once she began her medical rounds.” What such limited and superficial exposure actually amounted to, however, is unclear, as

87 primitivist Negrophilic introductions and pastimes of Carl Van Vechten.98 During their trip to the U.S., Stein and Toklas attended at least one “Negro party” thrown for them by

Van Vechten and went on a specially-arranged police-car ride during one of their evenings in Chicago, which essentially amounted to a voyeuristic tour of black and

Chinese quarters in the city.99

Along with the pervasive images of otherness in the black body and the African continent, the yellow (or sometimes “brown”) body and the Orient were prominently figured as both essentially invadable and as threateningly invasive. Those associated with the “yellow peril” were often deemed even more intrinsically other than Afro-

Americans based on the fact that their bodies were seen as always irrevocably tied to the distant Orient. Europeans and Euro-Americans tended to see “Asiatics,” “Orientals,” and

“Mongols” as fundamentally incongruous with and unassimilable to Western lifestyles and as particularly threatening Asian hordes.100 In his The Rising Tide of Color Against

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Cope also acknowledges: “What all of this translates to in terms of her knowledge or experience of various aspects of African-American life one may only guess, since, . . . . aside from ‘Melanctha,’ there is no record of her thought” (Cope 316-17). Cope does not mention Stein’s further comments on “Negroes” in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Everybody’s Autobiography. Her statements on race, African- ness, and relating of encounters with American “Negroes” in these two later works are, I find, particularly problematic, racializing, and arguably racist. 98 In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Stein mentions the many “Negroes” sent to them by Van Vechten, and includes her comment to Paul Robeson that in her view, Africans essentially suffer from “nothingness.” 99 The “Negro party” and police tour are recounted by Stein in Everybody’s Autobiography (206, 214). I disagree with Lynn Weiss’s characterizations of these and other accounts in EA as proof of Stein’s progressive racial attitudes. I believe Weiss fundamentally misreads instances that rather demonstrate the extent to which Stein and her contemporaries were blind to their own white racial/racist privilege and themselves misread and naturalized terrorizing and voyeuristic white practices as part of a normal, unproblematic state of affairs. 100 Publicly articulating the racial climate of his times, Stein’s contemporary, President Theodore Roosevelt, for instance, repeatedly expressed anxieties regarding the mixing of whites with “Orientals” and blacks in particular. He joined many Americans in their support of legislation for Chinese exclusion (Sinkler 314, Dyer 140). And regarding the population of Hawaii, for instance, Roosevelt felt that the

88 White World-Supremacy (1920), Lothrop Stoddard endorsed the widespread notion that identified Asia as “the principal ‘colored’ threat to white civilization” (Lee 136). In the

U.S., “between 1890 and 1924 the American public witnessed an outpouring of books, articles and editorial comment concerning the impending danger to Western-white-

Christian civilization from the growing power of Oriental peoples” (Thompson ii), and

Stoddard’s popular book was just one among many.101 Roger Daniels and other historians have noted that “yellow peril” literature “permeated all media as anti-Oriental sentiment took root in the late nineteenth century” (vii).102 Significantly, in

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! many “imported Oriental workers,” were so racially and constitutionally different that “the predominantly white population of the United States would be unable to absorb or assimilate them” (Dyer 135). For this reason, Roosevelt vowed to “do ‘everything [he] could to encourage the immigration of Southern Europeans to the island [of Hawaii]’” (Dyer 135). Roosevelt claimed that those who continued to bring in Asian labor were neglecting the nation’s racial fitness and “incapable of thinking of the future of their children” (Dyer 135). Roosevelt’s views were part of a general consensus among American politicians, scientists, philosophers, and social scientists at the turn of the century, all of whom also believed in “the black American’s threat to the integrity of the white American body” and the necessary exclusiveness of the varied but essentially white “new American race” (Wald 204). Kipling is another contemporary who “warned that the Orientals would one day march upon the Caucasians” and remarked that the Chinese were “the only people in the world who could ‘swarm’” (Thompson 3). Though the focus of anti-Oriental hostilities underwent superficial shifts depending on specific immigration trends and events in Asia, a blanket hostility against Asians as an unwelcome race was consistently palpable from the 1880s through the 1940s. 101 Thompson cites a few among the many yellow peril books of the era: National Life and Character (1893) by Charles H. Pearson; The Law of Civilization and Decay (1896), America’s Economic Supremacy (1900), and The New Empire (1902) by Brooks Adams (18, 21). There are of course the aforementioned works by Lothrop Stoddard, Madison Grant and others. Frank Norris’s “The Third Circle” (1897) is one literary example of the vilification of the Chinese and Orientals in the U.S. And Wilde’s somewhat denigrating Orientalisms in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) provide another non-American literary example. 102 The yellow peril attitude toward the Orient flourished not only in the U.S. but also across Europe in these years. During this period, the European powers were as equally set upon subduing Asia for its uses as the U.S. The Boxer Uprising in China, which managed to fix “Western attention on China for two months” in 1900 (Utley 115), and Japan’s technological advancements and victory of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 contributed to a general sense in the white world of an imminent military threat from the East (Utley 115, 119-122; Thompson iv). In 1895, for instance, the German Kaiser, William II, had a painting done depicting the nations of Europe, under “the sign of a radiant cross” and with the “Archangel Gabriel” standing before them, fending off a “horrible spectacle in the East.” The picture showed a “Chinese dragon” with a “seated Buddha upon its back” rising in smoke over “the burning cities of Europe,” and was captioned with a call to European nations to defend “[Their] Faith and [Their] Home” (Thompson 1). The

89 contradistinction to all other immigrant groups in the U.S., Asians were distinguished by the fact that even the slightest of their numbers in any American community incited intense racial hostility and calls for total exclusion. Though the number of Chinese migrants in California once topped the population figures among those considered non- white racial minorities, their numbers never approached those of other European immigrant groups.103

Asians in the U.S. also shared with Afro-Americans various vilifying and specifically racialized modes of characterization and objectification. In popular culture, for instance, there was by the late nineteenth century already a well-established tradition of the caricatured, “pidgin”-speaking Oriental as a rat-like, “polluting racial Other” (Lee

34). “From the 1850s onward, the character of John Chinaman and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Japanese characters were played in yellowface on the minstrel stage” (Lee 34).

Though minstrel theatre also included caricatures of the Irish, Jewish, and other European immigrants, there were nevertheless key racial distinctions made between these characters and others, blacks and Asians especially, who were racially circumscribed as un-assimilable. Robert Lee notes that the shows “drew sharp boundaries around racial !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Kaiser had reproductions of the painting sent to leaders around the world, including one to President McKinley. Such imagery, of course, merely built upon and disseminated well-worn stereotypes of the East. (See Schueller, Tchen). 103 Even at the height of intense anti-Japanese sentiment in California, during the first decades of the twentieth century, they constituted merely three percent of the Californian population; and on a national scale, anti-Oriental prejudice became prevalent enough to bring about the legislation of wholesale anti- Asian exclusion by 1924 despite the fact that the total “Oriental population” combined “never constituted as much as four-tenths of one per cent of the total” (Daniels 59). The number of Asian lynchings in the U.S. did not approach that of black victims, but on the West Coast especially, lynchings, mob violence, and wholesale mob evictions from towns were not uncommon in these decades. See Bulosan, Chang, Daniels, Lee, and Asian American history in general. Local and regional newspapers throughout the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also cite numerous instances of mob violence and forced evictions of entire neighborhoods by white mobs.

90 difference and made clear the unacceptability of racial amalgamation” by specific racial others (34-35). By depicting transgressive behavior “among various white characters” as

“funny but acceptable,” while depicting other inter-racial behavior as both “ridiculous and punishable,” minstrelsy, popular theater, vaudeville, and early cinema made clear distinctions between absolutely unacceptable and “polluting” mixing from incongruous races (whites and “colored”) and essential “normal and nonpolluting (and hence amalgable) ethnic difference” among whites (35).104

In other popular visual media prior to the boom in cinema, caricatures of

“Orientals” depicted them as exotic, “queued and rat-eating,” “emasculated” or

“hyperfeminine” (Lee 9). In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a popular trade card phenomenon helped to circulate race-caricature images employing newly inexpensive and popularized color-printing techniques. Yuko Matsukawa explains that trading cards (mainly produced between 1875 and 1900) were a primary source of “the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 104 Part of the draw of these popular performances was the impact of apparently absurd and surprising performative incongruity, as the putatively inferior and essentially foreign “Chinese body” was juxtaposed with American theatrical forms and seen performing in an American idiom, as Krystyn Moon has documented. Yellowface traditions in minstrelsy carried over into vaudeville forms of the early twentieth century, with growing numbers of performers of Chinese descent entering the industry in attempts to profit from white audiences’ continued attraction to exotica and race-denigrating humor (Moon 1–6). Early Chinese American vaudevillian Lee Tung Foo, for instance, who was American born and “knew what it meant to be Chinese only through what he saw in immigrant communities and in American caricatures,” dressed in Chinese robes and sang in Cantonese, but also in his routines, “broke out into an Irish brogue” for certain songs, and sang German drinking songs in the original German” (Moon). One critic praised Lee’s performance, pleasantly surprised by his “excellent voice” that was used “with such amazing intelligence, that one almost forgets his race,” and remarked on Lee’s surprising sense of humor and fluency in English (Moon 1). Typical reactions of white audiences resonated with Robert Park’s view of Oriental (and black) bodies as constituted by an excess trace of physical otherness that rendered them essentially at odds with American identity. As Moon notes, the act of course “had everything to do with race” (2), as did the fact that white audiences found it so entertaining. It was the performer’s body’s very lack of racial transparency, of overly marked racial otherness that made any display of assimilation or intelligence such a “surprising” and charming racial spectacle. Tina Chen mentions similar constructions of racial difference in the late nineteenth-century British music hall world, with which Sax Rohmer, creator of Fu Manchu was well acquainted.

91 images of Asians that infiltrated the everyday lives of Americans in the late nineteenth century” (206) as popular collectibles among especially white and middle class women and children.105 Matsukawa notes in particular that “[m]ost surviving trade cards reflect the overwhelming popularity of the trading card printed in color” (2020):

By making real the yellowness of the Oriental, chromolithography developed a visual vocabulary of race by reinforcing through color the language of the eighteenth-century racial taxonomies of Linnaeus and Blumenbach. . . . By producing and reproducing color, trade cards featuring the Oriental managed to fuse anti-Chinese sentiment and scientific discourses of race with everyday consumption. . . . Whereas political cartooning provided most of the vocabulary for representing the Oriental or the Chinaman in black and white, chromolithography injected color into this language, representing racial difference by directly showing “yellowness.” . . . . foregrounding yellowness, a color associated with jaundice, disease, and contamination, trade cards instruct consumers to see Chinese as different, if not unclean. (Matsukawa 201–202)106

With “the advent of chromolithography, the new technology of color printing,” trading cards uniquely colluded with the era’s representation of race as naturally, physically inscribed otherness, as empirically demonstrable and especially manifest in difference of color.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 105 Matsukawa describes the dissemination of images of the Oriental through this medium prior to widespread visual ads in magazines and newspapers and the rise of film and television. Trading cards “were small advertising cards” used by manufacturers and shops, which were “often left on a shop’s counters for the clientele to take as they pleased, sent out to consumers in advertising campaigns, or distributed at World’s Fairs” (200). 106 The cards used traditional stereotypes (depicting, for instance pidgin-speaking “Chinamen,” a “bowing Chinaman’s offering of a rat on a dish,” or “Chinaman as laundryman”) and “served to instruct their audience in racial hierarchies” (201); the cards further visualized the already “most visible Asian (American) body: that of the Chinese male worker” (201). Cards advertising laundry soap, for instance, combined middle class consumerism with Chinese exclusionist sentiment, implying that “the Chinaman as other” was “a threat to the national cohesiveness” and that their product would allow “women of the house to participate in a national project,” the “eradication of the Chinese from the United States” (206-207). One political card that capitalized on anti-Chinese sentiment in promoting Grover Cleveland for the 1888 presidential campaign denigrated Benjamin Harrison as “a real Chinese candidate” and as associated with a yellow flag meant to stand for China (Matsukawa 204).

92 Perhaps most strikingly from the turn of the century on, the explosion of the film industry also bathed the public in visual representations of the “colored” world.107 The nation’s budding film industry served as a new platform for the wide dissemination of black stereotypes (Nesteby 2; Robinson 161-63); and both through what was shown and what was considered taboo, the film industry constantly reflected the nation’s obsession with racial purity, racial boundaries, sex, and “miscegenation.”108 Cedric Robinson points out that the very beginnings of film in the U.S. were rooted in a white nationalism that reinforced traditional black stereotypes.109 Robinson quotes Daniel Bernardi (1996), affirming that “racial meanings are a significant, omnipresent part of the birth of cinema”

(Robinson 163). And in particular, early cinema returned again and again to “the basic miscegenation theme” (Lyman 186). Social standards and outcry limited even the filmic representation of racially mixed romances.110 This national obsession with race in terms

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 107 By the final years of the nineteenth century, minstrelsy shows had declined somewhat, but the pet stereotypes of minstrelsy were prime fodder for American film. As James Nesteby notes, early in the century, the “negro,” “nigger,” “darky,” “colored,” and “coon” were “images used indiscriminately in films and other media and ‘the literature of the day’” (14). 108 Early films incorporated minstrelsy, vaudeville Uncle Toms, plantation folk images, and numerous whites in blackface. Many films “viciously lampooned the black, glorified the plantation tradition, rationalized lynchings, and explained away inequitable treatment of blacks” (Nesteby 14). 109 Some of Edison’s early shorts for instance, were titled: Buck Dance (1898), Watermelon Contest (1899), The Edison Minstrels, Minstrels Battling in a Room, Sambo and Aunt Jemima: Comedians (all of the latter series produced between 1897 and 1900) (Robinson 162—references Cripps 1977). Robinson notes that these films notably excluded positive images of Afro-Americans. The films failed to “suggest the existence of black men like Lewis H. Latimer” (Robinson 162) for instance, whose work as an engineer and inventor was much related to and built upon Edison’s work. 110 In general, as Lyman notes, over the first five decades of the twentieth century, “neither real blacks nor blackfaced white men could be allowed to seduce or even appear erotically attractive to white women” (191). One 1912 film, Gauntier’s Missionaries in Darkest Africa had the “remorseful daughter” of white Christian missionaries commit suicide “rather than face up to her erotic interest in the native who kidnapped her.” In Tarzan of the Apes (1918), the white female lead had to be rescued from “a menacing African, a “black ape.” (Lyman 186-67). By 1927, Hollywood banned the “cinematic representation of romances between actors of different races and prohibited altogether any positive image of intermarriage”

93 of “blood, sexuality, and commingling” (Hartman 10), though not as explicitly detailed after “Melanctha,” irrupts in Stein’s writing in many pieces that challenge the referential logic of race and representation.

This increasingly visual, easily disseminated, and widely impactive media that took off around the turn of the century significantly contributed to and marked Stein’s

“new” “twentieth-century” world as a properly divided, global racial order.111 The

“reportorial” quality (Robinson 162) of many of the early films, with the implications that they objectively documented real conditions, gave the impression that racist images were simply true representations of black life, and that existing racial hierarchies were historically inevitable manifestations of nature. Such new visual technologies were instrumental in the promotion of the period’s imperialist exoticisms and agendas. As part of the strategically racializing film culture of the period, D.W. Griffith’s overwhelmingly popular The Birth of a Nation (1915) provides a telling marker of the general cultural

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (Lyman 187). For the most part, characters of color were limited to popularly acceptable, subordinated and stereotyped roles. 111 Though each western nation had its particularly inflected imperialisms and racist imagery, the increasingly global cultural media of film and other easily reproducible forms of visual culture contributed to a widely shared semiotic vocabulary and imagery of racism across the white Euro-American world. As Robert Rydell and Rob Kroes have demonstrated, at the turn of the century, shared racist culture, largely in the form of exported American mass cultural forms, were common currency across the imperial West. See Rydell and Kroes Buffalo Bill in Bologna: the Americanization of the World, 1869-1922. By the late nineteenth century most of Western Europe had been exposed to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Shows and real “Red Indians.” Thus even in Britain, which apparently lagged in film production, the ethnographic element in film influenced the huge popularity of cinema in British culture and displaced the popular ethnography of English music hall culture. Ann Ardis notes the particular racialist draw of American cinema in early twentieth-century England, for instance, as reflected in D. H. Lawrence’s novel, The Lost Girl. In the novel, Lawrence, bemoaning the displacement of high culture and literature in England, has a character deride the childish “ethnography” of the passing music hall form, while praising the cinema as “ethnography for adults” and as access to genuine knowledge and “instruction” of “people’s actual lives” (Ardis 88).

94 climate and heightened hostility toward American blacks, as well as the national obsession with issues of racial reproduction and racialized sexual threats.112

The release of The Birth of a Nation and its unprecedented success also coincided with the Klan’s resurgence in 1915 (just after Stein’s 1914 publication of Tender Buttons) and paralleled the rise of eugenicist trends that continued into the 1920s (Nesteby 39). Of the tale that depicted the U.S. as an Aryan brotherhood fractured by black evils, that celebrated the Ku Klux Klan as necessary protectors of racial order, and that endorsed lynching as proper means for policing the savage black, President Wilson reportedly remarked that his only “regret” was that “it [was] all so terribly true” (Robinson 174).113

It is striking that in both Griffith’s film and Dixon’s novel, the “re-whiting” (Robinson) of American history is figured as a family drama in which the dynamics of race most significantly work through sexual and reproductive relations.114 The focus on race-

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 112 In its historically whitened telling of American history and its depiction of the Afro-American as the evil “seed of disunion,” Griffith’s film (also seen as Thomas Dixon’s work—as it was based on his book The Clansman (1905)) reflected the broad white-American consensus regarding black bodies as a real and vicious threat to national well-being (Robinson 167, Fredrickson 280, Nesteby 14). 113 The pioneer feature-length film not only attracted millions of viewers, it was nearly unanimously celebrated by the press, by intellectuals and statesmen, and even enthusiastically endorsed by President Woodrow Wilson (Nesteby 27-30; Robinson 174). Wilson’s approval of the film was not surprising given his known racism and the spirit of his “Teutonic ode, the five-volume A History of the American People,” which he had published in 1903 (Robinson 163). A showing at the White House, in addition to evoking presidential praise, also met with enthusiastic appreciation on the part of various congressmen and Supreme Court justices. Edward D. White, the Chief Justice at the time, was “contemptuous of a moving picture” in general, but approvingly confided to Thomas Dixon at one showing that “he had been himself a Klansman in New Orleans” (174). Though Northerners may have at times identified “racist” attitudes with the anomalous backwards element of the Old South, the public’s wholehearted support of the film—north, south, east, and west (apart from the very few activist detractors who called for a complete ban or at least partial censorship of the film (Robinson 173))— demonstrated the implicit national approval of lynching and the notion of Afro-Americans as dangerous, degenerate primitives in their midst. 114 Griffith’s specific choice of words in titling The Birth underscores the film’s pointed emphasis on the sexual/reproductive dangers of the black body and black sexuality, perpetuating the myth of black male sexual aggression, masking the white male extensive history of rape, and tacitly calling white women to birth pure white children for the sake of the nation. James Nesteby comments that the title of the film also “spoke both to the birth of the Anglo-American Union in America” and “to the birth of the original Ku

95 mixing and reproduction (in both sexual and visual terms—as in the “mechanical reproduction” of images enabled by new technologies in photography and film) in and around Griffith’s tale played on the ongoing public drama and hysteria over Jack Johnson during his reign as heavyweight boxing champion in the years from 1908 to 1915.

Whites across the globe, regardless of nationality, erupted in fury not merely over

Johnson’s victory over white boxers but also particularly in his flaunting of relationships with white women and in the unstomachable repetition, reproduction, and dissemination of his fights through film.115

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Klux Klan” (33). Dramatizing white on black violence as necessary sexual policing and lynching as the proper and inevitable solution to the black “problem,” Griffith’s and his public’s celebration of lynching most potently demonstrated and ensured the placement of the nonwhite, dehumanized body before “the horizon of death,” as Silva puts it, without inciting any national “ethical crisis” (179). Given that rates of lynching surged in the 1890s and continued in frequency throughout the early decades of the twentieth century (Fredrickson 272, Gossett 273), the public’s embrace of the Klan-promoting film echoed the nation’s tacit condoning of lynching and other racial violence. Though the Ku Klux Klan represented the most violent agent of white policing, the Klan’s view of the black body as essentially criminal, sexually threatening, and less than human was evidently shared by white Americans across the country. Despite the more historically accurate reality of institutionalized white male sexual violence against black women, the most “benevolent” and open-minded among white Americans tended to share in common white antipathies toward racial mixing on the reproductive level and the view of the black body as a sexual and biological threat. 115 The public playing out, on an international stage, of the inextricable links among race, reproduction, and sexuality were vividly portrayed in Johnson’s story. His status as a rising world-wide phenomena in the years immediately preceding the release of The Birth of a Nation, and the casting of his fights as essentially symbolic of a war between the races, by both blacks and whites, further demonstrates the vast extent to which Stein’s world was particularly charged with racially loaded imagery and tension, focalized especially in the black body and black sexuality. Johnson sparked particular national furor with his highly publicized relationships with white women. His marriages brought about “charges of abduction;” numerous lynching threats, including one by the governor of South Carolina; a widely supported call for an anti-miscegenation amendment; various local and federal criminal charges; and even calls from Northern residents for “Southern white lynching parties to visit Johnson in New York or Chicago” (Robinson 177; Robinson cites Gilmore 1975 and Roberts 1983). Part of the upsetting nature of his “insolence” was that, again linked to the rise of the moving picture and the fact that his victories over whites were caught on film. According to one account, the1910 film of his fight with former champion James J. Jeffries “became as widely discussed as any single production prior to Birth of a Nation” (Robinson 176). All the films of his fights were seen as racially threatening, since they might “inspire the ignorant negro with false and pernicious ideas as to the physical prowess of his race” (quoted on Robinson 83), and they were overwhelmingly denounced by the white press and religious and civil leaders. The intensity of widespread public fury was such that following local bans of the films and urgings from numerous organizations and “such notables as Theodore Roosevelt,” Congress banned the distribution of fight films altogether in the U.S.

96 By the time film became a prevalent form of popular entertainment, literally

“colored” yellowface images and caricatures of Asianness were also in wide circulation.

The rise of film took “realistic” representation of Orientals to another level. Coinciding with the rise of anthropological and ethnographic studies at the end of the nineteenth century, along with popularly attended illustrated lectures by academics and often simply enthusiastic Western travelers, documentary-genre films added to the effects of the World

Expositions of the time in dramatically illustrating the otherness of Asian and other exotic bodies (in both serious, ethnographic, and humorously caricaturing but all consistently denigrating tones). Exoticist films of Orientals and the Orient fed on the curiosity of Western viewers and allowed the public easy access to world travel in a sense. In the U.S., E. Burton Holmes, who had spent five months in Japan in 1892, was inspired by the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago to give lectures on Japan and became among the most famous lecturers of the period (Roan 187). At times he used the

“new technology of cinema” in addition to “older conventions of travelogue accounts”

(Roan 188) and made comments expressing regret that he had not been able to capture his travels on film.116 Along with many of his contemporaries, Holmes valued the apparent capacity of moving pictures to “reveal” the real otherness of Orientals more efficiently

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 116 He once commented on the ineffable amusement of the Japanese at a garden party he had attended once in Japan: Bustles are funny. As worn in Japan in 1892, they were a scream. The dainty Japanese ladies, who would have looked so charming in kimono, had adopted western fashions but not western manners. When they bowed, they bent forward at the waist, again and again, jack-knife fashion. As their heads went down, up came the bustles. Oh, that the movies had been invented then!” (Roan 123) Holmes’s account is in keeping with the Orientalism and racism of the times in his objectification of Asians as amusing curios and as unable to truly blend with the West despite superficial adaptations.

97 than narrative or still pictures could.117 Unlike other illustrations, “moving pictures would affirm the extent to which [the Japanese] nevertheless remained Japanese” (Roan

190-91).118

The virtual world tour available through cinema extended the Western tourist- consumer’s apparent access to the Orient. In 1907 French essayist Remy de Gourmont commented, for instance: “I love the cinema. It satisfies my curiosity. It allows me to tour the world and stop. . . . to my liking, in Tokyo and Singapore. I follow the craziest itineraries” (1988 48, quoted Roan 187). Orientalist tours of Asia were already a popular alternative to “the more prosaic destinations of a European Grand Tour” for young

(especially male) Westerners by the time of Stein’s youth (See Roan 187, Wineapple 89-

95). Stein’s earlier Orientalist education included not only Leo Stein’s affinity for

Japanese prints, but also numerous tales and correspondence on the East from her brother during his own Oriental tour.119 As Gertrude’s brother and closest friend pre-Toklas, Leo strongly influenced Stein in her youth and young adulthood, and it is most likely reflective of her family’s and other middle-class Euro-Americans’ views in general that

Leo characterized Japan as “topsy turvy” and “comical,” and the Japanese as generally laughable, small, and surprising in their capacity to “really” act like live, normal human !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 117 As Roan comments, whereas in still images “the Japanese might appear westernized,” the draw of film in this situation was partly in that Holmes attributed to it a power to “reveal the superficial nature of this resemblance by showing the disjuncture between appearance and actuality.” 118 In another lecture on “Seoul, the Capital of Korea,” Holmes mentioned “that there should be a library of cinematographic records to preserve views of different cultures,” to capture the Koreans’ “unconscious little comedy of customs,” so “curious and picturesque” (quoted Roan 192–93). 119 Stein’s brother, Leo Stein, had accompanied his cousin Fred on such a grand tour of the Orient, including stops in Japan, China, and Egypt, and had become particularly enamored of Japan. Leo wrote to Gertrude and his aunt and uncle often about the endless charms of life in Japan, and had enjoyed setting up house with his travel mates, with submissive Japanese “wives” and all (Wineapple 90-95).

98 beings.120 Tours such as the one he embarked on not only participated in imperial projects of “scientific” and “empirical” race studies, but were also made possible by imperial or otherwise forced and unequal relations with Asian nations. A similar exoticist and Orientalist function was also part of early film in Europe. This was, again, perhaps especially the case in France, the leader in European cinema at the time.

In addition to these documentary travel films, fictive caricatures of Orientals and the use of yellowface in film was also popular on both sides of the Atlantic. The character of Fu Manchu, based on the books of Sax Rohmer, was cast as mysteriously multifaceted and ambiguous, but essentially made to embody a “personified ‘Yellow

Peril’” (Utley 126) and play to existing stereotypes; Dr. Fu Manchu was invested “with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race,” “tall, lean and feline, high shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan. . . . and long magnetic eyes of true cat-green” (Utley 126). The character and Rohmer’s writings were “exceedingly popular” (from 1913 into the 1950s) (Utley), enjoying “massive popularity in the United

States” and reflected a general trend in the American film industry at the time, of depicting the Chinese as “lustful, vicious, and immoral,” with particular affinity for and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 120 The extent to which Leo, and very likely the rest of his family (as probably most white Americans at the time) viewed the Japanese and Asians as utterly foreign, nearly inhuman or subhuman, so Other as to seem unreal, and in countless ways diminutive, inferior, and simply ridiculous in relation to Euro-Americans and Europeans also comes across clearly in othernletters Leo wrote to his family. In one of these, he writes: “We wear kimonos. . . . It is an almost invariable surprise to find that a Japanese baby (which looks exactly like those comical. . . . dolls) can really cry and play. Nothing on earth could be more comically ridiculous than the sight we saw. . . . of a score or two of Japanese children going through their exercises in front of the school house. None of them were bigger than [illegible]. . . . I believe they were all girls. . . . In fact in Japan everything is topsy turvy and most things are comical. A gallant soldier comical. . . . Japan is to me surprising in its continued unreality. Though we have been here now something over a week it all seems as truly a mere picture of something quite remote full of novelty. . . .” (Kyoto 22 December 1895, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature. Box 124 Folder 2711. YCAL MSS 76.)

99 resemblance to rats (Utley 128-129). The popular images were so racistly offensive that the Chinese government even “lodged a protest with the United States government, but to no avail” (Utley 129). Utley also notes that these images fed a rapacious orientalist and white supremacist vein present throughout U.S. popular culture at the time.121 While the

“mysterious” Oriental was at times associated with cultural sophistication, the prevailing stereotype was that of a repulsive, “truly diabolical Chinaman” (Utley 133). And while local regional or national racist depictions of the Oriental might have varied slightly, through film, the image of Fu Manchu became a “universally recognized Oriental” and

“the archetype of villainy” throughout the west.

As a leader in early film technology and production,122 Stein’s France also led in exploiting the new medium in its efforts to promote the nation’s imperial projects. Of all the western nations at the time, the U.S. and France together played the major roles in amplifying the ubiquity of racist, anti-black and exoticist imagery through the medium of film (Rosette 73-74). Much as early U.S. cinema was grounded in the promotion of racist stereotypes and the existing racial order, early French cinema, Carole Sweeney argues, was permeated by “the ideologies of French colonialism” and a desire to bring “home” images of “the cultural spoils of empire” (33). And as film was used in the U.S. to keep images of exotics and primitives from abroad and portraits of inferior “colored” folks at

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 121 Utley mentions that The Saturday Evening Post, “the most popular and widely read magazine of the period and the site of Charlie Chan’s debut” published “a short story with an Asian cast or setting at the rate of one every other month” from the years 1920 to 1941 (133). The thoroughly race-based character of U.S. popular culture at the time is further underlined in his note that “Only the perennial American favorite, the western, appeared with greater frequency and consistency.” 122 See Bannerjee, Lyman, Nesteby, Rosette, Sweeney. In addition to being a leading nation in cinematic production of the period, French culture was flooded at this time with both Negrophilic and Orientalist celebrations of racial superiority. (See Archer-Straw, Hale, and Sweeney.)

100 home ever before the public eye, France likewise capitalized on developments in film to represent the racial Others of its colonies and beyond. As Dana Hale has noted, after the turn of the century, French international expositions began to feature documentary films in “a special cinema house” from 1906 on (87). By 1922, France was supplementing its colonial exposition in Marseilles with extensive documentary footage from the colonies, and from its Indochinese regions in particular. Hale writes that “[w]hat the organizers could not transport from French Indochina. . . . they arranged to have filmed” (151). Part of France’s colonial administration in South Asia included a branch of “French cinematographic services” (151). And in addition to having around “300 Indochinese” sent over to “populate villages, guard exhibits, and perform before spectators” (150), various “propaganda films on Indochina were shown each day in the Intercolonial

Cinema” (151).123 Celebrating French civilization and the nation’s colonial accomplishments, French filmmakers focused on “the primitive and the exotic locales of empire,” romanticizing life in the colonies even as numerous colonial rebellions “were brutally crushed” (Sweeney 3).124

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 123 Outside of exposition-based film propaganda, the French film industry overall, sharing in the spirit of the French imperial apparatus, was generally flooded with “a deluge of exoticist films, colonial journals, and magazines depicting the colourful life of the colons” (Sweeney 31) during this time. 124 A starring figure in France’s negrophilie craze, and an example of the malleable signifying capacities of the colored body, Josephine Baker starred in several films in the roles of “characters from all over the French colonies” in the twenties and thirties (Rosette 90, Sweeney 32). Though an American, she was even celebrated as “Queen of the Colonies” (Rosette 140, Sweeney 9). Her popular image as the savage and sensual African princess demonstrates the “overdetermined racialised discourses” around the black body, the capacity that any “racial spectacle” had for signifying “all racial otherness” (Sweeney 9, 39), and the primacy of racial categories over national distinctions, even during this intensely nationalist period.Sweeney notes that throughout French culture, in all kinds of media, in the 1920s and 1930s, Baker was “the metaphor of the negrophile moment,” the perfect symbol of both sexuality and primitivism” (Sweeney 55). In addition to being hugely popular on stage and in film, her photographed images were widely disseminated. The image of her in the role of a colonial “’native’ dressed in the famous skirt of bananas,” for instance, was featured on one of the most popular postcards of the period (Sweeney 55).

101 The period of Stein’s residence in Paris happened to coincide with the height of

France’s empire in Africa, the rise of Negrophilia and American jazz in French culture, the growth of French control in and anxiety over Indochina, and the increased (and vigilantly policed) migration of South Asian “Indo-Chinese” to the French métropole125

(all in addition to the boom in visually reproductive technology). As the French government promoted the imperial glory and success of “la plus grande France” and attempted to mask anticolonial insurgencies in the colonies, it invested extensively in visually and culturally promoting its imperial projects in every medium available, and black and yellow bodies suffused Stein’s color-inscribed cultural contexts. Dana Hale and Panivong Norindr have detailed the extravagance of the numerous international colonial expositions in France in first decades of the twentieth century. Stein had attended at least one of these (the Paris Exposition of 1900) with her brother Leo even prior to her move to Paris (Wineapple 133), and quite likely would have visited the even more elaborate villages and live colonial exhibits and villages to follow after her move to

France.126

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 125 In his Phantasmatic Indochina, Panivong Norindr explains that as France attempted to keep up its image benevolent preservers of liberty and indigenous cultures in South Asia, for instance, the government brutally quelled anti-French uprisings in the colonies, restricted media in the colonies and the metropole, and set up an elaborate system of surveillance of all Indochinese on French soil. 126 As Hale and Norindr have also mentioned, for those who happened to miss these more elaborate displays of race and civilization, other “techniques in mechanical reproduction” such as “chromolithography” (that was also key in the rise of U.S. trade-cards, as mentioned above) flooded all forms of print media with literally colored and graphically detailed images of raced bodies (Norindr 3). In his discussion of French Orientalisms, Norindr specifically mentions that improvement in “coloring techniques” (emphasis mine) enabled by chromolithography bolstered the popularity of illustrated journals and was used in colonial propaganda posters, trade signs and advertisements presenting colonized sites and bodies in “glossy colors” in France (3, 4).

102 In her study of racial representations in late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century France, Dana Hale demonstrates that throughout Stein’s lifetime and residence in the country, technologically enhanced, visually colored, starkly racializing images thoroughly permeated everyday life, culture, and both popular and official constructions of national identity. In addition to boldly racist propagandist images of the French empire circulated by the government,127 the official trademarks of a wide range of products from soaps to chocolate incorporated racialized images of exoticized Orientals and primitivized Africans, regardless of the origin or nature of the product, simply because of the commercial appeal of such exotica.128 Hale notes that images of

Indochinese workers wearing the traditional conical “non la” hats were especially popular, as were images of Indochinese workers and servants “pulling carts,” “carrying loads of merchandise,” or pulling Europeans in rickshaws (144). Whereas Africanist images typically emphasized the primitive and portrayed Africans as “grands enfants”

(Hale 97), ubiquitous Orientalist images figured the Indochinese as the “subservient

Asian laborer” (Hale 74), as a “diligent gentle” subject suited for domestic service (Hale

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 127 One official 1931 advertisement for the Exposition Coloniale Internationale, for instance featured four distinctly colored and caricatured faces, representing the “red,” “black,” “brown,” and “yellow” shades of the Empire. A 1941 imperial propagandist image of France’s empire in “trois couleurs”—also played up the civilizational and racial superiority of France in a slant on the tricouleur France’s national blue, white, and red, which served as a vivid backdrop to the caricatured faces of an distinctly brown Arab, a blackened African, and a golden-hued South Asian. (Image available in Gueslin 55 and also online in Martin Shipway’s article, “La Décolonisation : une exploration à rebours ?”.) The “Trois Couleurs” affiche was designed by Eric Castel in 1941 for the intensely nationalist and pro-imperial propaganda campaign of the Vichy government. As Andre Gueslin has discussed, the French government was particularly intent on displaying its national power and civilizational superiority at the moment in which it appeared nationally weak; the Vichy government therefore emphasized “la puissance française” in particularly grand spectacles and extensive propaganda campaigns celebrating its overseas territories (Gueslin 58). 128 See Hale 30, 69, 74, 97, 142-150. Reflecting the widespread reach of American media and products, French goods and brand names even adopted typically American caricatures and language for blacks on numerous products (Hale 97).

103 67), and as “talented and amenable to colonial rule” (Hale 142), the “fils doué” of “la mère patrie” (Hale 176).

Evidently, the very notion of being “American” or European, of being a part of civilized society, and being in the Western world at all, was thoroughly steeped, throughout Stein’s lifetime, in foundational discourses regarding racial purity, sexuality, national identity, and the body. Stein states in her lecture, “Composition as Explanation,” that composition for the serious writer involves “using everything” (524) and that what distinguishes one generation of writers from the next depends on the distinction of “what is seen” (526) in each age. As Stein herself confessed,129 and as Dydo, Marjorie Perloff, and other Stein critics have demonstrated, Stein’s textual playfulness uses all sorts of material and associations on hand. It becomes evident to all readers of Stein’s corpus that her writing is thoroughly grounded in her own personal history and infused with meanings inflected by the particular shades of the historical scene she occupied. Stein even claimed explicitly that “the progress of [her] conceptions” were “entirely in accordance with her epoch” and that such a fact was apparent for those of her time who considered “the scene that was before [them] all from year to year” (Composition as

Explanation 526). In Stein’s attempt to express the “rhythm of the visible world”130 and all manner of “everything,” in her attention to what was “seen” in her own historical

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 129 In her “Transatlantic Interview” with Robert Haas in 1946, Stein discusses matter of factly that her writing is not nonsensical just because it is unconventional, saying that any use of language always retains some sedimentation and weight of meaning. 130 In reference to her noticeable shift in her writing after Three Lives and The Making of Americans, Stein writes that it was in the time of writing her playful “portraits” (such as “Susie Asado”) and Tender Buttons that she moved from being “interested only in the insides of people, their character and what went on inside them,” to feeling “a desire to express the rhythm of the visible world” (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas 781).

104 “scene,” it is far from irrelevant that race and racial difference were everywhere figured as visually reproducible and rendered as the most obvious, natural, external, and “visible” scientific truth par excellence. Although the ways in which race appears in Stein’s writing are perhaps unexpected, indeterminate, and playfully oblique, it is unsurprising that given how thoroughly race and color infused “everything,” every body, and every aspect of her (technologically enhanced visual) world, race would have an important place in her own many poetically disjunctive pieces that attend to innovative

“composition” while challenging conventional modes of representation.

105 Chapter 3 The Color of Butter

“Oh, where are you going to, all you Big Steamers, With England’s own coal, up and down the salt seas?” “We are going to fetch you your bread and your butter, Your beef, pork, and mutton, eggs, apples and cheese.”

“And where will you fetch it from, all you Big Steamers, And where shall I write you when you are away?” “We fetch it from Melbourne, Quebec, and Vancouver— Address us at Hobart, Hong-Kong, and Bombay.” Rudyard Kipling, “Big Steamers”

When treasures are recipes they are less clearly, less distinctly remembered than when they are tangible objects. They evoke however quite as vivid a feeling— that is, to some of us who, considering cooking an art, feel that a way of cooking can produce something that approaches an aesthetic emotion. What more can one say? If one had the choice of again hearing Pachmann play the two Chopin sonatas or dining once more at the Café Anglais, which would one choose? Alice B. Toklas, The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook

Monter les blancs en neige ferme en commençant avec une cuillère de sucre dès que le fouet laisse des marques, puis en mettant le reste et en fouttant à vitesse maximale pour obtenir un effet «bec d’oiseau», c’est à dire des pointes de blancs dès que vous retirez les fouets. Ajouter ensuite 10 gouttes de colorant brun dans les blancs fermes et bien mélanger pour une couleur homogène. Recette de macarons au caramel et beurre salé131

I. Contours of Butter, Body, Word

If writing that can be considered “avant-garde” is that which brushes up against the irrepresentable, inconceivable and ruptured interstices of spirit’s enfleshment and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 131 From puregourmandise.com.

106 radical materiality’s (enspirited) interior complexity (as in particular phonemes say, or the material texture of words), it would be apposite to consider Gertrude Stein’s unconventionally representational, “difficult” writings as distinctly avant-gardist. The boundary-breaking “interinanimative” (Moten “Black Kant”) work Fred Moten describes as taking place in the irreducible materiality-with-meaning of the cry and shriek (a particular articulation of blackness and the avant-garde) is significantly relevant here.

Though Stein’s work is obviously of an entirely different register, and dwells primarily in a much lighter (and whiter) and lighter-hearted space of language play and celebratory homoerotics, Moten’s evocation of the irreducible “material-phonic substance” (In The

Break 179) at work in certain instances of black-avant-garde writing and performance helps to describe the kinds of textual movement and sensual-conceptual strivings we find in Stein’s writing. In much of her writing that so profusely and intertwined-ly celebrates the body, sexuality, and the pleasures of the table, the singularity of Stein’s writing shows itself to spring (to a great extent) from her attentiveness to the weight, feel, and flavor of the word, from her affection for language as sound, sight, taste, and a rich site of possibility for communing, conversing, and loving.

Stein wrote profusely and across genres in varying styles and modes that are not easy to classify. As her readers know, a distinguishingly playful approach to language nevertheless comes across as a sort of loosely “characteristic” Steinian mode in much of her writing, which has been called “opaque,” “obscure,” “abstract,” “oblique,”

“subversive,” “experimental,” “difficult,” and “ridiculous.” While numerous definitions are attributed to the variously used terms “avant-garde” and “experimental” with regard

107 to literature, we might allow that such words, often linked with the “modernist” writing of the early twentieth-century, generally evoke notions of varyingly iconoclastic, “new,” unconventional, non-realist, and non-mimetic uses of language that noticeably depart from familiar inherited literary forms. Though some find the use of “experimental” to describe Stein’s writing problematic, if we take “experimental” to mean innovatively exploratory (rather than having to do with the sort of psychologically “experimental” automatic writing some of Stein’s contemporaries suggested she was practicing) Stein’s characterization as “one of the most uncompromisingly experimental writers of the modernist era” (Delville 52) rings true.

As Stein stated and as many Stein critics have demonstrated, in her handling of words and attention to the resonances of distinct, unconventional textual arrangements,

Stein made it a point not to use words as solely opaque phonic or graphic material, but rather, by highlighting their material, sensuous weight and composition, she focused on the generative possibilities coming from the interanimated conjoinedness of their irreducible materiality (of sound, appearance, texture, rhythmic weight) and their divergent connotative associations, indeterminate figurative capacities, and muddled historical and cultural sedimentation. In many of her writings, the playfulness and innovativeness that stem from her attention to the material composition and sonic resonance of the word as perhaps not merely or entirely arbitrary or irrelevant (unlike the

Saussurian “signifier”) with regard to possible meanings, feelings, and aconceptual soundings. In her Ugly Feelings, Sianne Ngai cites a description of this sort of writing

108 (that brings out the potential non-conceptual or extra-conceptual significance in the very materiality and phonic/graphic substance of the word) as offered by Susanne Langer:

The basic concept is the articulate but non-discursive form having import without conventional reference, and therefore presenting itself not as a symbol in the ordinary sense, but as a “significant form,” in which the factor of significance is not logically discriminated, but is felt as a quality rather than recognized as a function. (Quoted in Ngai 45)

This avant-gardist attention to the meaningful potential in the material medium of language is relevant to the compositional resonances of much of Stein’s work.

At its liveliest, Stein’s writing brings out not only or primarily the multiplicity and indeterminacy of possible referents (raised by unclear, singular arrangement, disruptive syntax, provocative context, punning, teasing, fragmentation, and playful permutations and rhythms) that might be attached to or carried within the word, but also to the differently dynamic suggestiveness of meaning, or feeling—of non-empty, not- meaningless rhythms, soundings, and echoes—reliant on the material qualities of the word itself and the material’s sense-suggestive, meaning-augmenting and sense– infracting interaction with traditionally attributed representational content. One example of such an instance appears in an entry on “MUTTON” (which also contains her reference to “mixed music”) in Tender Buttons: “A sign is the specimen spoken.”132

Stein’s choice of words and phrasing here bring into play the familiar meaning-potential of each word while also phonically and rhythmically stressing the substantive, material importance of the word or “sign” as also differently resonant with or evocative of the concrete “specimen spoken” rather than exclusively as transparent vehicle of abstract !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 132 Catharine Stimpson also mentions this line as an illustration of the importance of Stein’s work being read out loud “and heard” (1985: 72).

109 content. Repetition and purposefully evocative arrangements of sounds and words in her writing heighten one’s sense of the sensuous aspects of the words themselves, often involving a playful beat, a sense of song, and distinctly Steinian humor and laughter.

It seems not insignificant that both in her writing and in her own corporeality,

Stein embodied and displayed transgressive enjoyment, to the point of oft-criticized, scandalous or nonsensical excess. For many who met her, the fleshly evidence of her large figure shaped their impressions and characterizations of her as an eccentric writer of repetitive excess (and as a “fat” woman with a “large” and imposing personality), and was taken to be indicative of the great, unrestrained, inappropriate pleasure she took in food and eating.133 Many biographers have noted how great an impression her physical size, and her unfeminine ways (including her unabashed, profuse sweating, her “strange” attire, and her outspoken directness) made on her acquaintances, visitors, and friends.

Lucy Daniel, for instance, notes in her recent work that Stein was already overweight as a youth, and her size (in addition to her well-noticed, distinct Jewishness and overly casual

Californian ways) marked her as unusual whenever she was among new acquaintances, such as when she arrived among the girls at the Harvard Annex in New England. Daniel mentions that the other students often “commented on her fatness, her uncouthness and her uninhibited sweating” (24).134

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 133 Daniel comments that in her opinion, “Stein was no hedonist. She lived a temperate life, though she enjoyed good food and accepted good things.” (141) 134 Daniel goes on to say: “She in turn found them repressed and emotionally dishonest. There was a muted undertone of anti-Semitism in the atmosphere of Harvard, and most of Stein’s close friends were Jewish” (24). Among others, Catharine Stimpson has also commented on Stein’s body and “fatness” in particular as related to her sensuality, sexuality, Jewishness, and variously charged writing (1985).

110 References to Stein’s apparently hyper-impressive fleshliness and the very weighty, striking, overly-assertive existential and spatial presence her body asserted appeared constantly alongside critical commentary on her writing. Critics who disapproved of her seemingly nonsensical writing constantly stressed the offensiveness of her inappropriate physicality and her very person. And even Mabel Dodge Luhan, a contemporary and promoter of Stein, wrote affectionately of her but still noted the striking quality of Stein’s body:

Gertrude Stein was prodigious. Pounds and pounds and pounds piled up on her skeleton—not the billowing kind, but massive, heavy fat. She wore some covering of corduroy or velvet and her crinkly hair was brushed back and twisted up high behind her jolly, intelligent face. She intellectualized her fat, and her body seemed to be the large machine that her large nature required to carry it.

Gertrude was hearty. She used to roar with laughter, out loud. She had a laugh like a beefsteak. She loved beef. . . (Dodge Luhan 89)

The repetition of “pounds and pounds” above reflects the critical association of physical excess with the seemingly ridiculous and eccentric uses of repetition Stein was known for in her writing. Indirectly, however, we also get a feel for the potential closeness of

Stein’s writing to her embodiment and the relevance (for at least one observer) of her

“fat” and love of “beefsteak” to her more “intellectual” creative work.

As historian Megan Elias has noted, it was around 1910, about the time Stein began publishing her early work and embarking on even newer modes of textual play and disjunctiveness, that the tradition of appreciating “the full figure” and “plumpness” as a sign of health and wealth gave way to an emphasis, especially for women, on

111 slenderness.135 Daniel also notes that Stein’s readers, and especially her many hostile critics, tended to have strong emotional reactions to her work, and they often figured her large body as a logical reflection of or accompaniment to the out-of-control, seemingly nonsensical strangeness of her writing:

Her writing genuinely upset people. They called her insane, indolent, infantile, fat, Jewish, female . . . Even Edmund Wilson, at one point an admirer, referred to the ‘fatty degeneration of her imagination and style’ and to some of her prose as ‘echolaliac incantations . . . half-witted-sounding catalogues’. (141)

And such characterizations stuck with Stein throughout her writing career.136 It wasn’t until after the popular success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas that much of the public and press began to discuss her work from 1910 through the 1920s in seriousness as more than childish play or queer jokes.

The abundant commentary on and characterization of Stein’s “strange” physique and “half-witted” writing also consistently implied disapproval of her overly unconventional female, queer, and Jewish identifications and their apparent incongruence with the circles of high art, culture, and “serious” literature. A clear anti-Semitic strain, for instance, is evident above in the reference to “crinkly hair,” and other frequently anti-

Semitically caricaturing cartoon drawings of Stein appeared in the press, as well as both

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 135 Elias writes: “In approximately 1910, that ideal changed. Slenderness became the ideal, representative of modernity and echoed in a preference for streamlined design. Extra flesh came to be seen as a sign that a person lacked control of his or her passions and was thus a potentially less productive member of society” (109). By the 1930s, according to the film industry in Hollywood, advertising, and catalogs, “slenderness was the cultural ideal” and dieting fads began to pop up everywhere (118). 136 We can’t know how much such attention to her body bothered Stein, but we do know that she was often bothered that her personality (and probably as part of that, her person) seemed to get more attention than her serious writing attempts.

112 negative and apparently non-hostile, matter-of-fact references to her as a “Jewess”137 rather than as simply one of many American expatriates or as a poetess in a male- dominated arena. Catharine Stimpson comments that the frequent references to Stein’s size were also indirect or “deflected” critical attitudes toward her lesbianism. And a conflation of various aspects of Stein’s physicality is seen in Katherine Anne Porter’s caricature of Stein as “. . . a handsome old Jewish patriarch who had backslid and shaved off his beard” (Porter 1952: 43).138 Stimpson notes that critics did not openly comment on “her lesbianism until after her death in 1946” but nevertheless had often referred to her “mannish” qualities and unwomanly ways (68).139

In addition to providing an easy focal point of departure for various readings of her character and her work, Stein’s impressive physicality also served as visible evidence of her singular, apparently excessive appreciation for food. Her love of and concern over food is well known,140 and so it is not surprising that her particularly sensually-loaded,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 137 Thus, although Stein did seem to exploit strategies of racializing others (blacks and other “colored” populations) in order to reinforce her own position within a wholesome American whiteness, this clearly did not mean that she was exempt from certain forms of prejudice and exclusion herself, as a female, lesbian, Jewish writer. She apparently could and did identify, to a limited extent, with other racialized and excluded groups as a tenuously accepted, marginalized white person. But then again, most significant and consequential in this respect is that ultimately she and her family were embraced as “white,” and had access to all the privileges of whiteness, in a distinctly segregated U.S. 138 Quoted by Stimpson 1986: 68. 139 While in some ways Stein’s largeness of body could evoke the overly female, possibly fertile body, she was also characterized as seemingly sexless in her customary large, draping robes, much like a “monk” (Stimpson 70), and evocative, especially after her hair was cropped, of “Roman emperors” (Stimpson 71). Hemingway, who might have experienced vague sexual feelings for Stein at some point in their friendship, later characterized her in his A Moveable Feast as “heavily built like a peasant woman,” with a “strong German-Jewish face” and “immigrant hair” (14). 140 In addition to frequently commenting on the differences she finds between American and French cuisine in various writings, Stein also recounts the particular issue of the quality and variety of American cuisine available in hotels as a primary consideration of hers in deciding whether or not to embark on a year-long lecture-tour in the U.S.

113 embodiment-celebrating, textural writing would be full of food-related words and imagery (which is also often imbued with erotic and homoerotic resonances). However she might have felt about the public’s commentary on her size, she openly and enthusiastically enjoyed and discussed food, both in her writing and conversation.

Perhaps most well-known among her uses of food-focused vocabulary is her whimsical treatment of “FOOD” in Tender Buttons (which I will discuss in a separate chapter), both a playful experiment on differently rendering encounters with objects (and domestic spaces), and creative offspring of her affections for Alice Toklas.

In my own reading of a good portion of Stein’s writing, one surprisingly connective element that interanimates various singular yet intertextually insistent and word-communally dynamic strains across her work arises in the figure and substance of one of her many repeated and re-used pet-words, “butter.” Though Stein is known for her fondness for repetition and textual “insistence,” and though a writerly fondness for the word “butter” is superbly fitting in her case, the overwhelming ubiquity of “butter” throughout her corpus, and its dynamic compositional connectiveness is nevertheless striking. And not only does butter exemplify irreducible materiality, it raises all the complexity of textual slipperiness, compositional construction, and transformation through mixing and arrangement. It is also a site of the meeting of the “merely” culinary and Art, the aesthetic and the Aesthetic. And it happens to articulate some of the unexpected ways through which Stein’s writing approaches race at a slant.

“Butter,” “butter,” ”butter,” “butter,”—appears, reappears, and resounds insistently throughout Stein’s writing, from the earliest to the latest pieces. Butter’s

114 special nature as a fatty emulsion embodies in itself a structural hybridity, the “multiple oneness of life” achieved by nature and natural chemistry, and so in its basic composition it potentially evokes the complexes of race, racial difference, racial mixing, and composite social totalities.141 (Butter holds together enduringly distinct particles (of water and butterfat) in thoroughly intermixed suspension.) In keeping with her well known joining of sensual embodiment and textual play, Stein was keenly sensitive to this wealth of possibility bodied forth in the word and the substance. The associative, figurative, and flavorful possibilities that come to mind are endless: butter stands for and instantiates irreplaceable and irreproduceable fullness of flavor; pleasure of complex composition in simple substance; absolute interest in the actual existence of the object; smooth gift of steady, rending agitation; accumulation of the “traumatic kernel”142; captive air, extracted essence, suspended condensation; sweet and heavy

“centrifugitivity” (Moten).

Butter is infinitely malleable and endlessly suggestive, and insistently enjoyed and used by Stein. It is evocativeness: — the real thing; the ever-imitated; the wholeness, purity and (yellow-) whiteness of cream; mother’s milk, women’s labor, mama’s kitchen chemistry; “cow,” “cow,” “cow” (Stein); “cow cheese” (from the Greek); a delectable

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 141 The “multiple oneness of life” is a phrase of Trinh T. Minh-Ha, quoted by Fred Moten in In the Break (121). The beloved rich mass of “fat” might have struck Stein as in some ways reflecting the goodness or attractiveness of her own fleshly substance, while also reflecting an inner complexity. The firm softness of butter might also evoke essential otherness and distinct contrast from the self, as in relation to Stein’s name, which references the fixed hardness of “stone.” We also find in the word butter the combination of phonic abruptness and a malleable, roll-able middle (“tt”), and textual playfulness (“butt her”; and the sounding of the portmanteau word “utter”/”udder” for instance) serve as rich material. 142 It is the solid kernels of butter-fat that are worked out of cream in the churning process—and we also think of Zizek on Lacan’s Real as traumatic kernel.

115 case of “lifting belly” (Stein); the link to utter, mutter, flutter, fly, churn, burn, yearn; beurre blanc, beurre noir, beurre noisette (meant to signify the color of hazelnut—also known as “brown butter”); culinary alchemy; decadence; the firm and supple (Stein- stone-hard and butter-smooth); the earthy, natural, animal manmade thing; churned to the rhythms of poetry and music;143 creamy difference “spreading,” disseminating substance of procreative and creative reproduction; the homoerotics of “butt her”144; softness, shapeable, moldable taker of many forms; elusive shades of yellow and white145; the essence of the icing on the cake; the heart of the cake itself; essential oil and soil; reviver, infuser, and healer of dry, cracked skin; tamer of untamable (said “African”) hair; that melts on and rolls off the tongue; condition of possibility of the finest of French arts…146

It is no wonder that Stein was extremely fond of both butter’s singular effect on her palate, and its uses as a particularly favored, multiplicious147 part of her textual-material palette.148

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 143 The reciting of poetry is cited as one method that was commonly used to help keep the pumping, churning motions steady in time (Encylopedia of Kitchen History 222). 144 Stein repeats this formulation several times in “The First Reader” (1941), which also includes the word “butter” numerous times. 145 Stein mentions more than once in her repetitions of “butter” its ambiguity of color, as in the line from “A Sonatina Followed by Another” (1921): “Why can butter be yellow or white.” 146 I obviously identify with Stein’s intense appreciation for butter and flavor. In addition to being the central ingredient for many French sauces, butter is of course at the heart of the superb art of French pastry: croissants, éclairs, tartes, petites madeleines, la religieuse (itself a joining of materiality and spirit in a sense— of “le sacré et le sucré”; a fullness and filling, redoublement d’ecstase: un “gros chou fourré de crème” qui est “surmonté d’un autre petit chou fourré” –(la tete”), dont le tout est “décoré de volutés de crème au beurre), le divorcé, le Salambo, les macarons…(Descriptions of la religieuse from www.puregourmandise.com.) 147 The Oxford English Dictionary defines “multiplicious” as “having many parts or aspects; multiplex, manifold,” terms which could interestingly link the relatively, apparently simple substance of butter to the formally complex “manifold” Kant describes as necessary to objects potentially considered “beautiful” in judgments of “taste” (125). Multiplicious is also amusingly fitting here for both Stein’s textual uses and

116 It is easy to overlook (as I myself did in my initial readings) a provocative early use of “butter” by Stein in her personal and autobiographical novella, Q.E.D. (written in

1903 but not published until after her death), a fictional account (in relatively conventional narrative prose) of her first significant romantic attachment and the painful love triangle it involved. In the story, the character stand-in for Stein, Adele, falls in love with one Helen (May Bookstaver) in her first lesbian romantic encounter. Helen, who returns her affections, is however already involved with one Mabel, whom she’s unable or unwilling to leave because of her financial dependence on Mabel’s wealth and financial support. Facing the practical reality of this dilemma, Adele despairs of her own inability to provide such essential “bread and butter,” with the want of butter being unexpectedly emphasized as the most consequential in the slimness of her chances with

Helen:

Bah! what is the use of an elevating influence if one hasn’t bread and butter. Her possible want of butter if not of bread, considering her dubious relations with her family must be kept in mind. Mabel could and would always supply them and I neither can nor will. Alas for an unbuttered influence say I. What a groveling human I am anyway. But I do have occasional sparkling glimpses of faith and those when they come I truly believe to be worth much bread and butter. Perhaps Helen also finds them more delectable. Well I will state the case to her and abide by her decision. (35)

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! the figure of butter insofar as it is suggestive of the combination between “multiple” and “delicious.” (Thanks to Mary Ann Davis for pointing this out.) 148 For her own part, Alice B. Toklas was also immensely appreciative of butter and of the culinary arts, and she attributed to cuisine and cooking a fineness denied this domain by Adorno, as indicated in the epigraph above. The recipes she includes in her Cookbook illustrate in part her view of the elevated artistry involved in the culinary and suggest the actual importance and prevalence of butter in the Stein-Toklas kitchen and on their table. Toklas’s writing also seems to play on Stein’s sensibilities and vocabularies; they are equally filled with butter and Steinian resonances, as in the name of the recipe “Mutton Chops in Dressing-Gowns” for instance (where we happen upon Stein’s “mutton” to “button” to “butter”—or “mutton” to “mutter” and “utter”/”udder” and “butter.” Toklas’s recipes also underline the cultural centrality and geographic-racial associations of butter to French and Western-European cooking.

117 Bread and butter are here, of course, symbolic of the physical, practical necessities of life, here serving as a somewhat pre-abstracted (short of direct reference to money or wealth) yet representative sign for material sustenance and needs. In addition to stressing the economic preconditions for romantic and sexual relations, Stein notably inverts the conventional hierarchy of significance between “bread” and “butter,” where one might expect the want of sustaining “bread” to take precedence. Here it is implied that while bread might be expendable, it is butter that one would be unwilling to go without, so that what disqualifies Adele is her “unbuttered”-ness. We see not only the notable figurative capacities of butter (and bread) at work for Stein early on, but also her consideration of whatever pleasures, luxuries, cultural experiences, aesthetic life, and erotic delights that

“butter” might represent (in addition to the all-important easy access to butter itself) as essential rather than ancillary to decent living.

While bringing together both figurative and literal significances butter above,

Stein also hopefully hypothesizes that the “sparkling” elements she has noted in her inner-aesthetic-intellectual capacities will eventually translate into wealth and access to luxurious living. Throughout the passage, she highlights movements of both conceptual

(and capitalistic) abstraction as well as figural condensation, moving from potentially goods-related evocations of luxury to accumulable wealth and through differently representational (sustantive and recreational) abstractions associated with bread and butter, and also converting her potential spiritual/intellectual contributions into “bread

118 and butter”149 while keeping in play the physical qualities and pleasures of the actual substances referred to. And all of these semantic and suggestive elements are put in play with the aurally striking effects of phonic repetition in “bread and butter” (slightly explosive “b,” and rolling roundness of “r”s), which in turn have everything to do with

“body” and “being.”150

The importance of aesthetic, bodily, physical pleasures for Stein, and the textual richness of “butter” is thus, in a sense, introduced and articulated in one of the earliest consciously “literary” attempts of Stein’s writing career. The recurrence of butter and butter-related imagery in her later writing is perhaps of a piece with the serious value attributed to butter in the very personal account of her unfortunate “unbuttered influence” in Q.E.D. The writer’s distinct, character-marking and consequential lack of “butter”

(and all associated luxuries) at the time of the love affair possibly created a context in which newly acquired access to butter later in life—both in the form of excess wealth

(mostly after the writing of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas), and perhaps even more importantly the unexpected delights Stein found in her relationship with Alice—

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 149 We are given an image here of her personal products of labor that are to be figured into value-laden commodity, then further converted into abstract wealth which will in its abstract convertibility provide access to actual “bread and butter” and other forms of “bread and butter.” 150 The phonic and signifying parallel between “bread and butter” and “body and being” is also interestingly significant. Bread is relatable to the body as a supposed manifestation of mere sustenance and “mere life” (or animal-life), while “butter” is that which contributes to and constitutes human “being” beyond mere material existence or sustenance, evoking appreciation of physical comforts, civilization, culture, aesthetic pleasure, spiritual/intellectual life, etc. Stein’s marked appreciation for intellectually and aesthetically enriching, pleasureful cultural, visual, literary, writerly activity, and her view of these as no less important than other life necessities is seen (in addition to her prioritized valuation of butter here) elsewhere in her multiple comments on spending all her money on books in her youth, and on getting in debt in her early days as an independent young adult, for having spent, for instance, her monthly allowance on trips to the opera.

119 became loaded with personal significance.151 As Stein and numerous critics and biographers have noted, whereas in earlier work (especially in The Making of Americans)

Stein had been consumed with the problem of identity and accurate, comprehensive realization of all types of identity, in Three Lives she had begun to pay greater attention to “composition” in itself, and by the time she wrote Tender Buttons, she had become practiced in attending closely to the substance of every word, the “weight and volume” of each word and the specific effects of arrangement, of putting one word “next to another word (A Transatlantic Interview 18).152 It seems fitting that butter, in all its symbolic and substantive multiplicity, should re-enter her writing and her world in markedly disjunctive and exploratory forms, forms highlighting the meaningful creative and procreative possibilities in non-mimetic modes that don’t merely subsume incommensurable singularities of the word but that reach for the beyond of abstract meaning (the ineffable singularly lived liveliness of the body and the senses for instance) by exploring meaning’s dependence on and constitutional inextricability from the concrete textures and uncontainable singularities of the material and medium of language.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 151 Stein and Toklas met in Paris in 1907 and considered themselves married by 1908. Alice moved in at the Rue de Fleurus apartment in 1910, and Leo moved out in 1913. And it was between 1910 and 1913 that Stein really took off with her newly disjunctive poetic modes. 152 Jayne Walker, Robert Bartlett Haas, Stein herself, and others have commented on the dramatic shifts in style and mode/attention that are apparent in the movement from The Making of Americans and through several transitional pieces, including especially A Long Gay Book, into the distinctive rhythms and non- mimetic, less epically repetitive style, the epitome of which is often identified as Tender Buttons. Characteristically free from any false humility, Stein even commented to Haas in “A Transatlantic Interview” that in Tender Buttons, she believed that “there are some of the best uses of words that there are” (“Transatlantic Interview” 18).

120 II. The Color of Butter and the Color Line

During World War II, we bought sealed plastic packets of white, uncolored margarine, with a tiny, intense pellet of yellow coloring perched like a topaz just inside the clear skin of the bag. We would leave the margarine out for a while to soften, and then we would pinch the little pellet to break it inside the bag, releasing the rich yellowness into the soft pale mass of margarine. Then taking it carefully between our fingers, we would knead it gently back and forth, over and over, until the color had spread throughout the whole pound bag of margarine, thoroughly coloring it. Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic”153

As Jayne Walker and other Stein scholars have noted, the years that coincided with the early stages of Stein’s relationship with Toklas seem to mark her transition into identifiably “modernist” forms and concerns, marked in particular by increased attention to the materiality of language and the “problem of representation” ways (as related, for instance, to Flaubert’s writing and Cezanne’s painting for Stein). Stein’s departure from primarily mimetic modes of description and her exploration of attempts to capture the

“rhythm of the visible world” (in her words, which she believed she had at least somewhat achieved in Tender Buttons) are notable within the internally visible shifts of several transitional writings after Three Lives, especially, as has been noted by other critics, in A Long Gay Book (1909-1912).154 The enlivened uses of “butter” around the time of noticeable transition in Stein’s writing is apparent in another transitional piece,

Jenny, Helen, Hannah, Paul and Peter (1912), where we begin to see “butter” at work in

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 153 From Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984. 154 I use the dates of composition according to the Yale Collection’s dating of Stein’s manuscript notebooks, since many of her texts were published years after they were actually written.

121 intriguing ways that happen to involve both foregrounded compositional texture and also the question of race.155 The butter imagery in Jenny, H, H, P and P is articulated in terms strongly suggestive of the distinct historical issues surrounding butter and butter substitutes during Stein’s lifetime, which also happen to resonate strikingly with concurrent issues of racial identity, racial purity, and miscegenation. A summary of some of the public controversy surrounding butter and imitation forms of butter (probably surprising to us in its intensity at the time) might shed interesting light on loaded passages in this lesser known piece.

In the year of Stein’s birth, 1874, the United States purchased a patent for the recently-invented butter-substitute, margarine (also known as “oleomargarine”), and margarine production in the U.S. began the following year. From the time it was !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 155 Additional frequent reappearances of butter are abundant in her subsequent wealth of writing, not only in the “FOODS” section of Tender Buttons, where one might expect such occurrences, but throughout numerous “difficult,” and more narratively representational and conventional pieces. To cite just a few here, I note the following: “They got it in many ways, in hay-making, hay cutting. . . . fruit as they were picking it, they got it from milking, and butter and cheese making…” (The Making of Americans 1906-25: 132); “Win, win, a little bit chickeny, wet, wet a long last hollow chucking jam, gather, a last butter in a cheese, a lasting surrounding action./ White green, a white green.” (“Americans” 1913); “A pleasant taste and plenty of butter, a pleasant drink and plenty of water, tea and more fruit than in winter. . . . Butter which is every where has a little table, fish is all the time of day when the silver is away and there is more time.“ (“England” 1913); “Butter is not frozen, this does not mean that there is no bravery and no mistake.” (“France” 1913); “A question is a dozen. A question is the case of the revolving butter and last train and secretly really secretly, all that and no consideration for spells and little tiny white eggs and the same in blue and in a center color.” (“Old and Old” 1913: 228); “A little arrangement is manufactured by a shoal…..let it seat seat more than shadows which have butter.” (“A Sweet Tail” 1913); “We never have butter. “ (“Do Let Us Go Away” 1916); “And the kind of flowers that are necessary in the winter when there is butter. (“Miss Cruttwell” 1917); “Humming./ I felt the same in butter.” (“A Hymn” 1920); “No one can understand butter. Bread and butter, no one can understand bread and butter, bread and butter and eggs no one can understand bread and butter and eggs, no one can understand bread and butter and eggs and it is defended. Defended just as well.” (“A History of Having a Great Many Times Not Continued to Be Friends” 1924); “A butter leaves Scotch butter or my hope.” (“The Five Georges” 1931); “Here are so many things to ride/ And water and butter/. . . . It is often very changed to churn/ Now no one churns butter any more. . . . They will gather love is mine./ Butter is mine.” (“Stanzas in Meditation” 1932); “…they also often talked about eggs and butter.. . . She thought about butter and sugar and oil and coffee, she thought about meat and ham and hunger. She was never hungry but she always ate. . . . No one can add butter to roses he said. . . . she wished that chickens were commoner that is to say more abundant and likewise eggs and butter and meat, and even potatoes.” (Mrs. Reynolds 1940)

122 introduced in the U.S., margarine became “immediately controversial” as a threat to the dairy industry and butter producers. Despite the singularity in flavor of pure butter, its dearness put it at a disadvantage on the market. The butter-margarine conflict quickly became “possibly the most important food adulterations issue of the time” (Dupre 355), and a heated battle over the authenticity and purity of genuine butter animated the national public arena over the next several decades. Consisting chiefly of lard and beef fat mixed with small amounts of milk or cream, a minimal amount of real butter for flavoring, and yellow “butter-color” (Armsby 471), margarine was much cheaper to produce than butter and threatened both its value and market share. In the interest of the dairy industry, various states began prohibiting the manufacture, sale, and possession of margarine altogether in the early 1880s. (Canada and Britain also eventually passed restrictive margarine regulation laws.)

By the year 1886, at least twenty-four states had passed restrictive laws against margarine and all butter substitutes, and opponents of margarine were even successful in securing federal legislation, “the Oleomargarine Act of 1886,” which levied taxes on all margarine products (Ball & Lilly 489). According to one historian, margarine was the most “harshly treated” food product in the world, and was the “first domestic food to be regulated by the federal government in the United States” (Dupre 353). Apart from the adjusted pricing of the more cheaply produced substitute, an important factor in the market success, and threat, of margarine against butter was the extent to which margarine could sensorily pass for butter. Butter was defined by the Oleomargarine law as a food- product made “exclusively from milk or cream, or both with or without common salt, and

123 with or without additional coloring-matter” (Richards 71). The success of margarine tended to depend on how closely it could mimic the taste, consistency, and appearance of the real thing.

As margarine taxes were both difficult to enforce and ineffective in the prevention of fraud, opponents of margarine eventually pushed for color regulations that would clearly mark non-authentic products. Since the naturally white color of margarine made it unappetizing in its resemblance to lard, it had been standard practice to add not only butter flavoring but also a cream-yellow butter-like coloring to the product to add to its appeal. Since such coloring made it nearly impossible to distinguish between margarine and genuine butter on sight, and since imitations with butter flavoring could fool the taste-buds of many an “inexpert or careless consumer” (Armsby 472), the fraudulent selling of margarine as butter was fairly simple and thus widely rampant. By 1900, when

Stein was in her mid-twenties and a few years into medical studies at Johns Hopkins, as many as thirty-four states had outlawed yellow margarine, and five of them went “so far as to require that margarine be coloured pink” (Ball & Lilly 489). In 1902, the butter- substitute issue continued to provoke “fierce debate in both houses of the Congress”

(Dupre 355), and the 1886 Oleomargarine Act “was amended in order to discriminate against colored margarine in the states where the colored product was not banned”

(Dupre 355). Additional punitive taxes were placed specifically upon artificially colored margarine, but the Bureau of Internal Revenue complained that this law was also “quite difficult to enforce” (Dupre 355).

124 The question of the identification of authentic butter was thus a prominent public and political matter throughout Stein’s youth and young adulthood in the U.S. The cultural and significatory valences of butter were numerous. On an individual, personal, and intuitive level, whiter, less natural “butter-like” colors might have provoked associations with lard, shortening, and other fat-substances considered unappetizing for uses as spreads (though their use in other cooking was largely acceptable). In addition to such matters of individual physical impressions of the appetizing or unappealing, understandably linkable to cultural conventions and habits, color was also significant in terms of purely cultural value and status, important in its appearance and signification to others beside the purchaser or consumer, as a mark of authenticity and refinement. The loaded cultural and subjective significance associated with color was clearly evidenced in that producers of butter imitations (who did technically abide by the coloring bans but wanted to avoid taxation) took to enclosing small packets of coloring for consumers to add themselves to the uncolored butter-substitute, and that such products sold successfully. Dupre notes that “[t]he fact that this time-consuming activity was widespread shows that the yellow color had a value” in itself (359). Margarine consumers provided a stable market base, comprised of “mostly working class housekeepers who could not afford butter but wished to served something which looked like it” (Dupre 359). Color was not merely a matter of the personally appetizing, but also a function of the cultural and social associated with uses of and access to “real,”

“authentic,” “pure” butter. That such value and the potential cultural stigma attached to uses of butter imitations merged even with notions of moral substance and personal

125 character, and were in play in Europe as well as the States, is evident in the amusing comment of one contributor to the Times (London) in 1888: “Hereafter persons who eat butter substitutes will have to avow openly their meanness whether of spirit or of purse.”156

The butter issue thus turned, in many ways, upon the matter of color, but at the same time, the passing off of substitutes for real butter was a common enough occurrence to render color an unreliable and insufficient test of authenticity and purity. Though unsystematic, the persistent reappearance of butter, and its consistent juxtaposition with race-evoking themes in various texts, suggests that Stein’s frequent uses of “butter” might also be racially charged or obliquely raise racially inflected issues. The problem

(or boon) of butter substitution in the late nineteenth and through the early twentieth century coincided with the decades in which the national racial tension, racial violence, lynchings, and hysteria over miscegenation were at their height. The parallel terms and issues, and the striking resonance between the butter problem and the race problem in the

U.S. are uncanny. And the provocative resonance of the two matters is prominently, if obliquely, figured in various portions of Jenny, Helen, Hannah, Paul and Peter. In the text, especially in its later sections, where a noticeable shift from Stein’s earlier intensely repetitive modes (characterized by what Sianne Ngai has called “stuplimity,” a “synthesis of boredom and shock.”157) has taken place within the work, butter enters the picture in

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 156 Noted in examples of usages of “butter substitute” in the O.E.D. 157 See Ngai 2005: 9. Ngai defines and discusses the effects of “stuplimity” in her theoretically and aesthetically provocative Ugly Feelings. As she notes, we see such inducements to shock and boredom in the sheer massiveness of material, textual buildup and repetition in Stein’s The Making of Americans especially. Though a number of Stein’s “portraits” and other writings (such as the earlier portions of A

126 close and striking juxtaposition with evocations and images of “consanguinity” that most profoundly troubled the U.S. at the time:

Lard is not yet, butter is not more, oil is not pepper, all union is not more than less nutritious. So prepare the simple salmon. . . .

Lie awake and sing no more, have the permit on the shore, better all the times to pray sing and do not sing anyway, sing and prick the tumble bug, that does not show more reliance, it does show parts of a speech and sand is not sifted and no sensible single result is more obtained. Anyway there is no consanguinity.

The cloud is not mid-night, all striking has no mingling meaning. The stock that is disturbed is that which succeeding does not explain mischief. There is no mischief.

When there is clamor there is an up town out cry, when there is an up town out cry up town is farther out, there is a likelihood that the present particular suggestion means more than a plain face, it means a plain bestowal of no price.

So keenly attached and the obligation astonishing so then not to be emphasised means no singular distinction, it means the appetite is native and natives have no color. . . . (232-33)

In this passage we find a dense convergence of terms pertaining not only to matters of

“mingling” suggestive of racial mixing and the matter of “butter,” but also to issues of textual “mingling” and language play. Concern with “parts of speech,” matters of “no mingling meaning,” and unformed “clamor” are all juxtaposed with the mention of butter and butter alternatives (lard, oil, etc.),158 the denial of any “consanguinity,” mention of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Long Gay Book, Two: Gertrude Stein and Her Brother, and Jenny, Helen, Hannah, Paul and Peter) also exhibit such effects, the use of Ngai’s word is really only (or mainly) applicable to a limited portion of Stein’s writing and modes of composition. 158 The ordering of the terms, moving from lard, to butter, and then to oil, also happens to reflect the chronology of the imitation-butter story to some extent. Animal-fats, and especially lard and beef-fat, initially accounted for the majority of the fat in margarine, with smaller proportions of vegetable oils, especially cottonseed oil, through the First World War. From the 1920s on, however, coconut and other vegetable oils eventually accounted for the majority of fat in butter substitutes. By the time imitation spreads became more acceptable as an adequate substitute for butter and secured a wider share of the

127 “mischief,” the striking allusion to the “stock that is disturbed,” and the patently anxious disavowal in “There is no mischief.”

Alongside such weighty words as “consanguinity” and “stock” that is potentially

“disturbed,” the disturbance, “mischief,” and “out cry” in question thus emphatically evoke the heated race discussions in Stein’s time, highlighting the preoccupation, both in the U.S. and Europe, with the color line, racial purity, and the perceived threat of racial degeneration through miscegenation. The “out cry” and “mischief” in this passage highlight the meaningful potential in the phonic material of butter, in which we also hear

“butt her” (used by Stein later in her “A First Reader”), and raise all the potential sexual connotations in “butter” alongside evocations of the U.S.’s obsession with sex and sexuality in its policing of racial lines, the country’s all-consuming emphasis on “blood, sexuality, and commingling in postemancipation racial discourse” (Hartman 10).

Intimations of violence and the sexual crossing of racial boundaries also come across in the reference to “clamor” and the boundary-crossing mark of some “shore,” where there is cause to “[l]ie awake and sing no more.” And the suggestion that anything other or

“more than a plain face,” anything marked as too “particular” may be linked to disruptive

“clamor,” is invoked in contradistinction to the self-pronounced universality of those who claim to bear “no singular distinction,” as genuine (white U.S.) “natives” of “plain face” who “have no color.” In addition to highlighting these preoccupations with racial distinctions, the use of “stock that is disturbed” constitutes a point of convergence for other disparate yet noticeably parallel threads of meaning in the final section of the text. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! market as the most popular spread, they were composed of a greater proportion of vegetable oils (Dupre 360).

128 While “stock” was most commonly used during Stein’s time, a period of heightened race- consciousness and eugenic fervor, to refer to racial lineage, it was also used to refer to livestock such as cattle bred for profit, and raises associations with chattel slavery. The term’s lesser-known usages included dairy-specific references to a “stand or frame supporting a spinning-wheel or a churn” and also to the “udder of a cow” (OED).

Resonantly stressing the racial undertones of these passages, “stock” thus also serves a multi-layered potential reference to dairy and butter production, further binding the race- evoking terms of the text to the prevalent butter imagery.159

In the context of the loaded historical, racial, and butter preoccupations of Stein’s day, the passage above, which repeatedly stresses “color,” matters of “mingling,” concern with “consanguinity” and disturbance of certain “stock,” and contradistinctions between those with “more than a plain face” and “natives” of “no color,” situates “butter” as much more than an isolated or insignificant non-sequitur. Compounded with Stein’s personal interest in race and human typology, and in the context of Baltimore’s racially diverse but also divided and highly color-conscious world, it would have been improbable for Stein

(as an avowed lover of food and evident appreciator of flavor and butter) not to notice the striking parallels in the multiply articulated, prevailing “color” conflicts of the time.

Allusion to the imitation-butter debate, with the mention of “lard” and “oil” (the two chief sources of fat in butter substitutes) alongside “butter” above (“Lard is not yet, butter is not more, oil is not pepper” (232)) is suggestive of the conflict between butter and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 159 Additionally, as David Lloyd has helpfully pointed out: Stock also connotes the shift from material capital (stock=cattle= “head”= “caput”! capital) to immaterial financial “stock” just as these texts constantly play with the evaporation and recondensation of linguistic material into sense and sound.

129 other “adulterated” meat-fat-based imitations while also pointedly evoking analogously framed matters of racial “consanguinity” and “passing.” As with the issue of strictly segregated racial coexistence in post-Reconstruction U.S. life, the coexistence of butter and imitation products in the marketplace was acceptable so long as visible distinction between the two products helped to ensure the marked authenticity and superiority of butter. The significant moral weight attributed to such issues and the cultural and moral, even spiritual, meaning assigned to the boundaries between the true and pure thing were imposed and maintained through the strict labeling and policing of the “fraudulent,”

“adulterated,” (“miscegenative”) character of those trying to “pass” for the “real thing.”

Further on in the text, additional passages drawing on the butter conflict stress the echoing of the broader color problems at play in the butter issue:

Pink is not white and cream is yellow, that does not mean that all of this is spoken, it means more trying than there is shape. There is that use of an independence and more is used together than any diamond. It was not that color.

Startling and a victim, starting the milder drink of poison, starting it and settling it and all of not that color, to distinguish everything apart does not mean brandy, a liquor has that fire, it is toast. So much spread meat is not the cooler color, it is so cool that the cheese is milder. (Jenny, Helen 233)

Both here and in aforementioned passages, the repetition of “is not” and “does not mean” emphasizes the distinctly differential system of value, signification, and identity at work in the color conflicts. The first line re-introduces the very colors involved in the imitation butter problem in the U.S. (pink, white, cream, and yellow), specifically naming the key substance, cream, of which the unadulterated purity was of definitive consequence. The statement that “cream is yellow” after the mention of pink and white recalls the protective actions regarding the more or less yellowish “butter-color” of real butter against the white

130 of butter-substitutes, as well as the marking of inauthenticity through unnatural and distinctly unappetizing pink coloring. While differences between the “natural” yellow color of real butter and the “fraudulent” “artificial” yellow coloring of otherwise white margarine fueled much of the debate around color, the instability of these differences themselves echoed the haunting indeterminability of racial identity in the U.S.160 The drive “to distinguish everything apart” in such matters, and the importance of identifying fraudulent “spread meat” (lard-based imitation spreads) that is significantly “not the cooler color” by nature, again raises the issue of racial anxieties regarding undetectable

“mingling” and “consanguinity.”

Throughout these passages, allusions to the troubling indefiniteness of the shades of both real and imitation butters, and the steps taken to legally define and distinguish the

“imitation,” “imperfect” and “adulterated” spreads (Hasse 22) from genuine butter, given the possible lack of sensorily detectable differences, uncannily resonate with the accompanying terms of racial categorization and segregation in the United States.161 In addition, Stein’s articulation of a question of “cooler color” alongside terms suggestive of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 160 The instability of the color issue in the butter conflict being partly in that real butter ranged in color from whitish to deep yellow and was at times itself artificially colored, while margarine could “naturally” appear yellow without colorants depending on types and quantities of vegetable oils used. 161 The definition of margarine as any spread not exclusively composed of butter and cream, echoed the “one drop rule” (both popularly and legally established in many states during this same period in the first decades of the twentieth century), which would define a nationally excluded category of “colored” “nonwhites” and denounce any trace of “consanguinity” as excludable. The pragmatic value of “whiteness as property” (Cheryl Harris), which led to the common phenomenon of “passing” as white, curiously paralleled the question of color as unverifiable constitution in the butter issue. Stein’s coupling of the butter and race issues further suggests itself in the multiple definitions of the word “stock,” in which the rapprochement of both butter production and slaves links the two issues and plays on the common nineteenth-century linking of black bodies and food. (Kyla Wazana Tompkins)

131 the butter/butter-substitute conflict resonate strongly with the her later reference to such

“cooler” color as linked somehow to blackness:

Why is black cooler, black is cooler because spread in makes a little piece of pillow and a coal black lace. This is best shown. . . . What you call them what you call them say butter butter and let us leaves and a special realteration lace a realteration lace. (In the Grass (On Spain) 1913)

In this later passage the near-explicitly racial terms, “black,” “coal black,” and even

“cooler” (in terms of the aesthetic/stylistic flair and “hip”-ness attributed to blacks and

Afro-American culture, especially to the striking innovations of black music of the time, and also the putatively less inhibited, “carefree” quality whites associated with black arts, dance, performativity, and social life) evoke images of blackness and race again in conjunction with mention of “butter” (also “spread”). The “coal black lace” of the passage not only evokes the caricature figure of “Coal Black Rose”162 but also echoes the degrading (though also transgressively appropriated) tradition of (coal) blackface in minstrelsy and early twentieth century American theater and film culture. The butter issue thus evokes another sort of cultural “authenticity,” the exotic primitiveness that white Euro-American writers and artists attributed to Africa and to Afro-American life, the wildness and sensuality of black performance and white fantasy that they took for the

“real” thing, intriguing primitive essence untainted by civilized life.163

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 162 Saidiya Hartman makes reference to this character as a figure in American popular culture of the late nineteenth century. 163 The broad cultural connotations prevalently associated with butter during this period even happen to show up in remarks made by Ezra Pound. Dismissing the inferior “oleosities” of Wells, Bennett, and company, Pound explicitly distinguishes modernist literary invention by associating it with the marked superiority of authentic “butter.” In a 1920 essay on Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr. Pound states that if it lacks “beauty,” it “at least refuses to accept margarine substitutes” (Quoted in Ardis 98).

132 In this early, still “transitional” work, Stein thus very suggestively presents the ways in which the butter conflict reflected the simultaneous furor of concern around race in the period. She implies here not only a certain literary awareness that the conflicts are mutually resonant and figurally interactive, but also their prominence in her own thought and perception of the times. And here she only begins to demonstrate how the intensely charged issues of racial purity, authenticity, and miscegenation intersected (both in the public and in her mind) with the uncannily related significance and being of “butter.”

While the frequency with which “butter” recurs in her work and the abundance of references to race or race-suggestive imagery in her writings are striking in and of themselves, in their separate occurrences, it is particularly striking and curious to note the ongoing frequency with which these words and images occur together across a broad swath of her writings over the years.

Again, noting these instances in and readings of Stein’s work is not meant to suggest that her work is meant to be or can be thoroughly “decoded” or translated into discursive terms (though there is plenty of playful, especially homoerotic encoding happening in her work). It is the case though that Stein’s work lends itself to serious reading and discussion that explores the meaningful potential in the interaction of the

“weight,” “rhythm” and “texture” of words as they interact with, displace, augment, and inflect, rather than completely nullify, their conventionally assigned meanings. These readings suggest possible, non-conclusive, uncertain (but personally resonant, and I think textually relevant), and for the most part unappreciated implications and aspects of these writings. And so without claiming that “butter” or race constitute some sort of “key” or

133 supremely central theme for Stein’s work, I note just some of the nonetheless striking, numerous rapprochements of butter and race (not always immediately juxtaposed, but often occurring in proximity in a single piece) below:

Colored janes and a high lip ruddy, a gook in soft bees and little holders. . . . Go in pour the chain for it full of china. Full of china choice up. Full of china crossed in. Full of china. Full of chin that has china. Chin and china. China. . . . A question is the case of the revolving butter and last train and secretly really secretly, all that and no consideration for spells and little tiny white eggs and the same in blue and in a center color. . . . I. CUT INDIANS. . . . Cut circles in Indians. . . . Colored up with let keen girl clink gage . . . It is in by the perulean repetition of amalgamated recreation of more integral and less solidifying rudeness. (“Old and Old” 1913)

English or please english. . . . Anguish anguish anguish./ Puzzle a tower./ Real button./ Real butter or nuts./ Real button nuts. . . . / Weeding butter. (“Emp Lace” 1914)

Please pale hot, please cover rose, please acre in the red stranger, please butter all the beef-steak with regular feel faces. (Tender Buttons: “FOOD” 1914)

Humming./ I felt in the same butter. . . ./ I want riches./ Not butter./ Did we say butter./ Fish./ Not riches. . . ./ All towels are European./ Not yet./ Be plentiful./ All joy./ Immerse./ Help from the colonies./ Policing the Turk./ Daisy./ Delay. . . ./ I mean to pass away water and milk and lettuce I did. I made a mistake. . . . Prunes and apples and butter. We were to write for it. . . . I want to knit and to sew and to make that fire. I want to change places. I want to be told what to say. (“No” 1915)

Question and butter. . . . Lifting belly fattily. . . .Are you afraid of Negro sculpture. / I have my feelings. . . . So how do you do to the lady. Which lady. The jew lady. / How do you do. She is my wife. . . . Do you like ink / Better than butter. / Better than anything. / Any letter is an alphabet. When this you see you will kiss me. (“Lifting Belly” 1917)

We had splendid Egyptians and they did lose a thousand pounds a year. . . . Listen to me. We have come here to think and read about China. . . . From the standpoint of white all color is blue. . . Please remember me partly because of the interest in savages and partly because of wishes. . . . I do not believe in South African rebellion. Butter charms me. (“Miss Cruttwell” 1917)

134 The history is told of a butter and cheese sold. . . . Seize easily colonels and kernels. . . . Colours, blinded by colours, a negro not a tree, a white soldier or birth, a daring Indian or a real Asiatic, can Lenin silence Lenin and be vicious, be very delicious.” (“Woodrow Wilson”) (1920)

This is what Frank says./ Frank says pass me the butter./ Are many willing to go to Sweden./ Chinaman chinese chinaman chinese, Chimes and chinaman carry, they marry too. (“Dolphin” 1921)

Why can butter be yellow or white./ She is so political. . . . tea pots lean on elephants and a spring is lost. . . . all day has been passed, splendidly with an Englishman a negro and a Pole. . . . Relieve me relieve me from the Turk. He was not a Turk he was partly Negro. His father came from New Orleans. . . . Little Alice B is the wife for me. . . . In passing through France she wore a Chinese hat and so did I. . . How often do we need a kiss. Very often and we add when tenderness overwhelms us we speedily eat veal. . . . And what is the difference between white and yellow. . . . I love my own little jew. . . . and I do care I care for her hair and there for the rest of her too my little jew. (“A Sonatina Followed by Another” 1921)

Fill the jew. With what. With butter. Thank you so much for all that good butter…. (“As Fine As Melanctha” 1922)

One little Indian two little Indian three little Indian boys. . . . To an American an Indian means a red skin not an inhabitant of the east or west Indies or of India. . . . When we are astounded astonished concerned received or intimidated we do not recount roses. . . . Do you remember how often we had cake. Do you remember how often we had butter. Do you remember how often we had what we needed. (“American Biography and Why Waste It” 1922)

Natural phenomena consists in silks bureaus butter and lamps. . . . Marries. . . .This is the way to share butter and below fresh butter and below and to share fresh butter and below. This is the way to share fresh butter and share fresh butter this is the way that they share fresh butter. (“Natural Phenomena” 1925)

Miss Alice Toklas wishes to engage someone who will be reliable courteous and efficient. . . ./ Butter and better and she was very glad to be as sad as that indeed. . . ./ Rosy rhymes with cosy and posy rhymes with rosy and rosy rhymes with rosy and posy rhymes with posy with cosy with rosy and with an effort. It is easy to say knitted. . . ./ Fifty-eight fifty-eight ate ate honey honey and butter bread and butter butter and honey too and she moves paper. . . . Having had a piece of bread and butter. Having had a piece of meat and bread and butter, having had a piece of cake and meat and bread and butter having had a piece of cheese and cake and

135 meat and bread and butter what follows. Strawberries. . . . (A Novel of Thank You ca. 1927)

. . . . they often talked about dates in cakes and they often talked about bread in soup, they also often talked about eggs and butter but most often of all they talked about guinea hens and geese. They liked that the best of any subject of conversation. . . .

. . . . She thought about butter and sugar and oil and coffee, she thought about meat and ham and hunger. She was never hungry but she always ate. She thought about noodles and cream. she was often thoughtful. (Mrs. Reynolds 1940)

If in the (only partial) samplings above the prevalence of “butter” is not surprising to

Stein’s readers and critics,164 what might be more striking to veteran Stein readers and critics is the repeated textual joining of butter and race. (I purposefully omit the notorious passage from Tender Buttons above since I will focus on Tender Buttons separately.)165

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 164 Additional (though still not exhaustive) examples from other texts include: The whole swindle is in short cake and choice cake is white cake and white cake is sponge cake and sponge cake is butter. . . . A cousin to cooning, a cousin to that and mixed labor and a strange orange and a height and a piece of holy phone.(White Wines 1913); Color rices./ Color rices. . . . What is a soiled butter. . . At a slant./ Slant or. /Noises. / Beaded lay tea. . . .Cooking. / Cooking. . . . Go white go white. . . .Shades of. Sample. . . . This made a change./ All the salt./ That was nice./ Bread and butter. (Oval 1914); I meant to help myself to oranges and butter. . . . Purest china tea. (Painted Lace 1914); Shoulder . . . knee. . . . near so red pale. . . . butter creams. . . . leaves color black. . . leaves color girl. (Series 1914); South Africa and me/ We think we are so free/ But then again we can/ Obliterate a man. . . . For a British king or queen so mean./ Indeed an account knows/ Which way they rub their woes. / And in the middle Christmas/ There is butter. (A Hymn 1920) 165 In various writings, including Tender Buttons, we also see the closely related recurrence of the symbolically-loaded “butterfly,” which itself further evokes numerous race-related and especially Orientalist associations from Stein’s time. Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (1904), based on the original American-written Madame Butterfly (1898), dramatized Orientalist notions of the Asian on the global stage. And as Mari Yoshihara has discussed, performances of the opera raised issues of authenticity and imitation resonant with the complexity of such stakes in the butter-margarine issue. While critics praised the “performative mastery” of white singers for “conquering that wide gap” of racial difference in playing the character Cio-Cio-San, the successful Japanese performer, Miura Tamaki, who became famous for her portrayal of Cio-Cio-San, was consistently lauded for her seemingly natural “identification” with the “diminutive and fragile Cio-Cio-San” (Yoshihara 981). Rather than commenting on Miura’s performance, critics often linked Miura’s success in the role as naturally linked to her actually being the “real thing. . . . so Japanese. . . . a cute, quaint little doll. . . . invincibly Nipponese,” as one critic put it, capable only of offering “pretty imitations of an Occidental prima donna” as a performer (quoted Yoshihara 981).

136 If we consider this repeated textual rapprochement between race (including loaded color references, uses of racial epithets, references to racial groups, racialized bodies, and other race-suggestive terms) and butter in the passages above, we find again implications of the kinds of consonant parallels that were raised in Jenny, Helen, Hannah,

Paul and Peter. The irreducible substantive singularity, the importance of singular flavor in the authentic substance of butter comes across in the sheer abundance of the word

(especially in conjunction with the prevalent food imagery throughout Stein’s writing) and the indication of communal, conversational, nostalgic appreciation of butter and related items as “sugar” and “cake.” The ambiguity of butter’s potentially fraudulent and misleading color (“yellow or white”) and the relevance of its substance (whether consciously noted or not) to the irreducibility of race (as opaque, unsublatable materiality) and the scandal of transgressive sexualities are strongly evoked in the reference to the “perulean repetition of amalgamated recreation” (“Old and Old”). The possible allusion here to the disseminative associations of “perula/perule/perulae” (as botanical reference to seed or bud covering) and the evocation of “amalgamated recreation” (multiply suggestive of mixed pleasures, multiplicious activities, and hybrid creativity) in this line offer a dense illustration of the ways the mutually interactive resonances of butter and race also happen to converge in (and open up the textually proliferative potential of) the word “amalgamate.”

137 III. Rules of Love and the Color Line: “They Do Not Amalgamate.”

While it is less frequently used now, in Stein’s lifetime, “amalgamate” and

“amalgamation” were densely loaded and oft-used terms. We find one example of such common use (in the nineteenth and through the early twentieth centuries) in Alice B.

Toklas’s unconventional Cookbook, which continues in the textually rich strain of Stein’s

“butter” uses. (Toklas’s use and other texts suggest that much more than today, the word

“amalgamate” was a cooking term that was more commonly used in Stein’s time than in ours.) The recipes in Toklas’s collection involve profuse amounts of butter and cream, and in her introduction to the recipes, Toklas notes the central role of butter in cooking and in French cuisine in particular. She explains that butter “of excellent quality” was essential to French cooking, not only for its exceptional flavor but also for its distinct combinatory, flavor-binding capacities as well. Butter was especially crucial to the

French, Toklas writes, “because it ‘marries’ as they say, that is it amalgamates all the flavours of the dish to be prepared” (Toklas 4). In light of the fact that, according to

Toklas, the French had a profound “[r]espect for the inherent quality and flavour of each ingredient” in cooking (4) and an awareness that “[f]lavours are not all amalgamative”

(5), butter was important as that which could bring together flavors while enhancing the distinct flavors of each ingredient (none absorbed into or erased by the others, rather than effectuating an undifferentiated blend), and in ways which made clear that “not all” flavors were “amalgamative.” Toklas’s description of butter and her choice of words in explaining its culinary importance further reinforce the resounding connections between

138 butter imagery and race, regarding, for instance, notions of enduring, irreconcilable, unmixable incommensurabilities among distinct races, and the culinary-aesthetic, sexual- reproductive principles determining what or who could or should not mix and “marry.”

Toklas’s language further amplifies the potential significance in Stein’s coupling of race and butter language by bringing into play another side of their convergence in the very language of race and “miscegenation” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.166 Vocabularies of butter and race in the period did not only merge in varying and countless discussions regarding singularity, authenticity, indeterminable color, and apparent (or elusive) discrepancies among intuitively associative, (un)detectable-by- flavor (butter substitutes being too deceptively “authentic” for some, and happily passable-enough in butter’s place for others), consequentially and culturally significatory shades of yellow, white, and pink. The parallel racial resonances of such discussions were further amplified by the very specific and prominent use of the word “amalgamate” in both cooking and in official (public, academic, and legal) discourses regarding the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 166 As Hartman and others have noted, a key component of U.S. racial dynamics was the obsession with sex, sexuality, and interracial sexual relations. Though the institution of slavery, and also imperial-colonial relations, insistently disavowed, officially occluded (though undeniably apparent to all), misconstrued, and productively used the rampant, coerced relations between white American males and black or non-white women, it also criminalized and militantly guarded against relations between white women and non-white men. Hartman explains that while white sexual coercion of black women was always construed as consensual and reciprocal, relations between black men and white women were always identified as rape and deemed punishable by death. Commenting on the racial mindset and racial anxieties of both the U.S. and Europe, Thomas Dyer writes that few theories “gripped the Western imagination more completely at the turn of the century than the idea of race suicide” (143). The ubiquity of the race suicide discourse is seen partly in the successes of Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916), Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920), and the general Eugenicist agenda. In The Great Gatsby (1925), Fitzgerald even alluded to “The Rise of the Coloured Empires by this man Goddard” as a well-known cultural touchstone (quoted English 75). Even when publicly condemning lynching, Roosevelt, for instance, “couldn’t speak against it ‘without also making extended comments on the horrors of rape’” (Sinkler 295); he assumed with the rest of white population of the country a natural criminality and dangerous sexuality in black men. Others stated that anti-lynching laws were pointless and would “necessarily be ineffective” given the inevitability that any “contact between the races” would trigger white “opposition to blacks” (Handlin 64).

139 profoundly problematic and obsessed-over matters of sexual and reproductive relations, and the process of defining and guarding whiteness. Racialists exploited the context of national obsession with racial identity and “scientific” accounts of purported racial

“fitness” or “degeneration” to foster intense social policing of sexual relations between races, especially between white women and non-white men, not only between blacks and whites, but also between Asian men and white women.167 Stein’s explicit use of

“amalgamated” (especially in the middle of and in conjunction with a butter- and race- color-imbued passage) and Alice’s use of the word bring into focus the particular sexual- reproductive questions at the heart of the American race obsession. In the 1920s, even the Supreme Court would define as “white” only those groups who were seen as “readily amalgamated” into American society.168 Though racial categories were somewhat evolving and malleable, decisive color lines were most consistently and insistently articulated along the lines of groups that could or could not be acceptably

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 167 As the Page Law, accounts from Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, and numerous narratives and news articles from the period indicate. 168 See Robert Lee (76). Given the national-preoccupation with “miscegenation,” racial reproduction, “proper” marriage relations, and racial fitness in biological terms, it seems that the Supreme Court’s use of “readily amalgamated” would most likely have been understood as referring to officially acceptable sexual (marital) and reproductive relations and preoccupations, rather than cultural and social mixing. Here the inextricable intertwinement of gender, sexuality, and reproduction with the racial are quite evident. Particular racist characterizations of the Chinese, Japanese, and other Asians in the U.S. insisted on their being neither culturally assimilable (unlike essentially “American” and often Christian Afro-Americans) nor biologically and reproductively “amalgamable.” The U.S. Senate in a “Report of the Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration” would state for instance that the Chinese were “[a]n indigestible mass in the community. . . . inferior in mental and moral qualities, and all peculiarities, . . . . They do not amalgamate, and all conditions are opposed to any assimilation. . . . it would seem that an unlimited influx of Chinese might be a great future evil. . . . The testimony seemed to be concurrent that the Chinese are non-assimilative with the whites; that they have made no progress” (v– vi). (See also Robert Lee, Irish Chang, Sucheng Chan, Daylanne English, Lisa Lowe, Laura Kang, H.A. Millis, and V.S. McClatchy, California State Board of Control, and the Senate of the State of California.)

140 sexually/reproductively “mixed” into the national body according to the white-majority,

Euro-American population.

Stein’s profoundly racially defined world was very particularly policed (in ways not unknown to her), especially in the U.S., in an age of enthusiastic (white) racial-nation making and intense racial hostility. From the 1880s through the 1930s, the U.S. officially: carried out projects of final eradication and/or engulfment-through-Euro-

American assimilation of the Native American populations remaining on the continent; endorsed de facto and de jure racial segregation; tolerated and even supported racist anti-

“miscegenation” policies in many states; turned a blind eye toward the intensification of racial violence and lynching; passed numerous bills to legally exclude increasingly larger swaths of racially different, non-European populations and to respond to popular calls to enforce such exclusion; and fought for racially justified and stratified colonial control in

Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, Hawaii, and the remaining un-parceled continental territory still occupied by Native populations. White American citizens who took for granted that the nation should embody a “racially conceived and configured homogeneity” (Goldberg 5) worked to reinforce and naturalize racially defined borders and citizenship privileges with the backing of natural and social scientific “data.”

As Daylanne English has explained in detail, this “modernist” moment coincided with the growing popularity and influence of the eugenicist movement.169 Federal

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 169 A consideration of one important contemporary of Stein, the relatively “progressive” president, Theodore Roosevelt, for instance, who was outspokenly interested in issues of race, and had “more scholarly knowledge of and interest in the subject of race than any of his predecessors” (Sinkler 308), provides a telling representation of the rampant reproductive racial anxieties among even those considered racially “enlightened” in their day. Along with Whitman earlier and many other relatively “democratic”- thinking contemporary non-Southern Americans, Roosevelt firmly endorsed white “racial purity” in the

141 government committees routinely called on eugenicists for “expert” testimony on the degenerative influences of non-white residents (Jacobson 10-11, 77); and the U.S.

Immigration Commission specifically commissioned putatively objective studies by leading anthropologists and ethnologists, including Franz Boas (Boas 76) (primarily with intentions of building up evidence for greater immigration restrictions). Anti-Asian legislators from the West Coast joined forces with old stock Euro-Americans on the East

Coast in numerous successful moves to limit immigration and naturalization rights to those who “looked exactly like Americans” (Jacobson 78). Central to the anti-Asian campaigns from their beginnings and throughout this period was the claim that the

“Mongolian and American” simply “do not amalgamate” (U.S. Senate Report 1877).

Asians in the U.S. were an “indigestible mass in the community” and more generally “an undesirable element in a republic” (U.S. Senate Report v.)

Though racist hostilities were directed at various European immigrant groups,

(the Irish, Eastern European Jews, Catholics, Italians, etc.) at different moments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, over the course of the early decades of the twentieth century, and much earlier in western states, they were increasingly accepted as white, against those of non-European origin. As Americans faced groups of more !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! U.S. (Fredrickson 300). Roosevelt and many Americans saw themselves as examples of “the wondrous Americanizing alchemy” which melded “the Dutch, Scotch, Irish, and other race stocks” of Europe to create a new mixed but most importantly white American race (Dyer 132). Woodrow Wilson, both as a historian and as president, while endorsing a primarily “English-Americanness,” still lauded the “remarkable powers of absorptiveness” of the American population (Wald 201) which, though flexible, could not absorb elements that were too “alien.” And well into the twentieth century, white Americans of varied backgrounds and all classes accepted such views as scientifically backed common sense and would agree with President Coolidge’s comment in a 1921 Good Housekeeping issue, that “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend” (Jacobson 90). For most white Americans, American- ness was “both a racial and a nationalistic concept” (Dyer 132).

142 dramatically incomprehensible others, it would become clear that the “white Anglo-

Saxon republic” was one where “other white races could be absorbed within the existing racial mass while nonwhite races would be rigorously excluded from any equal participation as citizens” (Horsman 189).170 Non-Anglo, more “ethnic” European immigrants were, regardless of other forms of discrimination, viewed as both ultimately

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 170 Initially “less white” groups were seen as able to be enfolded into the U.S. precisely because of a white- racial relatedness (in keeping with Robert E. Park’s racial theories of assimilation), over and against “colored” others. Reginald Horsman, in his Race and Manifest Destiny, confirms that even when a narrower “American racial Anglo-Saxonism” characterized racialist trends earlier in the nineteenth century, non-Anglo immigrants were still seen as a part of a more broadly definable and mutually assimilable group of “races” within the “white race” (283, 292). Horsman also comments that the consistently exclusive but flexible definition of racial categories highlighted their differential and ideological basis, for it was observably the case that even at the height of Anglo-Saxonism, most Americans were “willing to tighten the general bonds of Caucasian unity when confronted by nonwhite races” (292). This general flexibility of racial categories in the United States, with different trends alternatively favoring “Anglo-Saxon,” “Teutonic,” “Norman” or other groups believed to be superior within the “white” race, continued through the end of the nineteenth century according to historian, Thomas Gossett. Gossett indicates that one of the key aspects of the ubiquity of racial discourse in the U.S. was that “race” had “no precise meaning” (118) and could therefore be adapted “to the needs of the moment” by policy makers and others (118): If they wished to demonstrate our racial kinship with England, they could say that both nations were basically Anglo-Saxon. If they wished to maintain that Americans were not at all plebeian, they could refer to the Norman blood which ran in American veins. If they admired Germany or if they wished to cast aspersions on south and eastern European immigrants, they could say that we were Teutons—a term which could, on occasion, include the people of England, Germany, Holland, and the Scandinavian countries. If they wished to include virtually all of Europe—for example, if they wished to demonstrate the solidarity of the white man against colored races or Christians against Jews—then they could refer to Americans as Caucasians or Aryans. (118) Though the privileging of “Anglo-Saxon” culture and roots was especially popular in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, especially among New Englanders, Gossett points out that even those who adopted Saxonist views were rarely “inflexible” and commonly open to related views upholding general European superiority (117). The specificity of Anglo-Saxonist, pro-Aryan and other particularist rhetoric was ultimately a part of and also gave way to the core conflict in the United States between whites and nonwhites (124). The Anglo-Saxon rhetoric that flared up around 1898 as the U.S. looked toward acquiring new territories was also part of the flexible discourse of general white supremacy in support of imperial racial orders (Gossett 312–314). Many who supported the notion of general Euro-white racial supremacy with regard to imperial conquests, like Theodore Roosevelt, spoke generally of the “American race,” a uniquely strong “new and mixed race” of whites from “many different sources” (319). In his history of nineteenth-century American political culture, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, Alexander Saxton also emphasizes the consistent privileging of a generic “white racial superiority” as a major ideological thread throughout U.S. history from its beginnings (1). The adoption and reinforcement in the U.S. of racial views from Europe contributed to the state’s “racially selective” and “racially exclusive democracy,” which had at best been “moderately tolerant of European ethnic diversity” but always “adamantly intolerant of racial diversity” (10).

143 assimilable and “amalgamable” and thus as part of a broader but still strictly demarcated whiteness. Variations among whites were eventually overshadowed by a starker binary division between a ruling “whiter race” as distinguished from non-European, “nonwhite” and “darkest” peoples (Horsman 240), the physical presence of whom (particularly Asian residents and Afro-Americans) helpfully marked the borders of American whiteness and the seemingly natural limits of transcendent liberal-democratic subjectivity.171

Among the avid “true believers in this doctrine” of racial fitness and potential degeneration, Theodore Roosevelt was one of many who “developed a morbid fascination with the specter of race suicide,” and he even “assumed the self-appointed task of national exhorter for fertility, potency, and virility” in the white population (Dyer

143, 147). While the relatively “progressive” Roosevelt advocated a certain amount of increased “social equality” among races, he repeatedly stated he did “not believe in miscegenation” (Sinkler 331). Like other white-race promoters, Roosevelt endorsed

American annexation of foreign territories while also insisting that white women fulfill their “special role as perpetuators of the race” (Dyer 150) at home. Although some

Americans in his day opposed imperialist endeavors because of race-related fears that the

U.S. would have to “absorb” hordes of non-white, conquered populations, Roosevelt celebrated American conquest abroad as long as robust reproduction rates among white !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 171 Reflecting the essentially dichotomous division of race, between mixed European “whites” and other variously “colored” populations, for instance, Theodore Roosevelt stated in 1914 that those European populations perceived as marginally white, such as Eastern European “Slavonic immigrants” could “become men precisely like ourselves” through a mere generation of assimilation (Dyer 135). And later, in Patterns of Culture (1934), Ruth Benedict, with her mantle of authority as an anthropologist and scholar, regretfully commented, “We [presumably white Americans] “have come to the point where we entertain prejudice against our blood brothers the Irish” (Quoted in Jacobson 106). In pointing out the apparent unnaturalness of prejudice against racial “blood brothers,” Benedict implicitly suggests that such prejudice would be natural if reserved for non “blood brothers,” for racial others rather than racial kin of sorts

144 women helped to maintain white dominance. Though he would eventually support increased rights for women, he emphasized that their most significant role was “primarily as breeders” for the race (quoted in Dyer 150), and he went so far as to condemn women who “flinch from breeding” as race and nation haters (153).

Roosevelt’s views with regard to white women’s racial responsibilities constituted, in a sense, a negative racialization of women’s bodies, as primarily fleshly in importance, more apt for physical/biological/maternal labor rather than other more

“serious” intellectual or cultural work, but many white women, including Stein, sympathized with such views and (naturally) capitalized on them for their own purposes.

As Louise Newman notes, in her study on White Women’s Rights, among early twentieth- century white women (in the U.S., Europe, and all over the colonized world), white women took advantage of the fact that western imperialism “suffused domesticity and women’s rights ideology with ideas about evolutionary progress and white racial superiority” (14). In their roles as “racial conservators,” as reproductive preservers of the

“racial stability” of the nation and thus enablers of the nation’s racial boundaries and racially oriented imperialisms, white women were seen as “crucially important to the successful carrying out of U.S. colonial projects” (Newman 17). Many white women also “began to think about citizenship in relation to the future of the white race, as global questions of empire and civilization began to shape domestic discussions of women’s issues” (Newman 52). In addition to playing the key role as reproductive “Mothers” of the white race, much of the performance of superior white womanhood in the Victorian home also included making the home “a space for the display of imperial spectacle”

145 (Newman 14).172 As is well known, much of the popular forms of exoticism,

Primitivism, Orientalism, and the “Indian Craze” were played out on the domestic scene and orchestrated by white women.173

As she did with many other issues, Stein had conflicted and undetermined attitudes toward the pragmatic white feminist stance. Though she is currently embraced by feminist and queer scholars, it is well known that she was far from progressively feminist herself, embracing, rather, the traditional mold of the gendered household, in which she occupied the place of the male genius while Alice entertained all the important

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 172 Newman explains that women, even and especially “progressive” and “feminist” women, in this period took advantage of the increasingly universalized authority of the natural and human sciences of their day, and eventually shifted the bases of their arguments from religious grounds to scientific claims and appeals to evolutionary doctrine. Even the oppressive, reproduction-emphasizing race ambitions articulated by Roosevelt were strategically exploited by white feminists at the turn of the century. White women reinforced the popular “scientific” conclusions regarding racial hierarchy and embraced their special racial- reproductive roles “as conservators of the race” (Newman 17). Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a “most influential and prominent feminist theorist” in the U.S. in the early twentieth century, “drew heavily on social-Darwinian precepts” and embraced white supremacist positions benefiting white women (Newman 134). Given that social scientists and social evolutionary theories attributed greater physical and social differentiation to more “civilized” races (Newman 34, 39), white women capitalized on the period’s popular and official emphases on racial difference and argued that their difference from men as proper ladies was the very “sign and measure of their civilized status” and “constituted the proof that they shared in the racial superiority of the white race” (Newman 39). Here, they held to the claim that their whiteness was the essential determinant of their fitness for increased political participation. Alternatively, when attempting to include black women in their quest for increased rights, white suffragettes, including Susan B. Anthony, ignored racial discrepancies and claimed that both black and white women were oppressed by their husbands’ authority (Newman 6). Blind to their own participation in the oppression of non-white women, white feminists and social scientists continued to define “true women” as “pious, virtuous, genteel, refined,” and proper mistresses of their properly kept homes (Newman 8). Most black women lacked opportunities for such refinement because of their needs to work, and were also commonly denied a sense of “virtue” given that “white men could rape black women at will” (Newman 9). 173 In addition to embracing their reproductive roles as mothers of the race, they were frequently drawn to missionary work abroad and involvement with Indian Affairs “because it permitted them to exercise cultural authority over those they conceived as their evolutionary racial inferiors” (Newman 53). At the turn of the century, white women were increasingly situated on the frontlines of civilizing projects and almost universally believed in the distinction and “cultural superiority of Western civilization” (Newman 160), a view taken for granted by all the political, scientific, and scholarly authorities of their time. Cognizant of the racial parameters of universal rights, feminists and suffragettes thus made “race-specific claims to sexual equality,” repeatedly emphasizing the “racial commonality between white women and white men,” and disparaging the fact that black men had the vote while putatively superior white women were denied it (Newman 40).

146 guests’ wives (Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and numerous other biographical works). In addition, it may come as a surprise that Stein even wrote an early piece, probably in 1901, called “Degeneration in American Women,” in which she echoed white male Americans’ calls for women to take up their reproductive responsibilities for the sake of the race and the nation. Echoing an article by a Dr. George H. Engelmann on

“The Increasing Sterility of American Women,” Stein argued that “women simply weren’t having enough babies” and that “the worst offenders were those college-educated women who either delayed childbearing or ignored it altogether” (Wineapple 152).174

Stein felt that especially given established professional limitations, for women

“childbearing was their best and only business” (Wineapple 153).175 Stein of course exempted herself and the gifted “few women in every generation who are exceptions to this rule” (Wineapple 153). Along with her belief in the essentially male quality of genius, however, there is also evidence that Stein sympathized with women’s causes to some extent. Her latest work, The Mother of Us All, written shortly before she died, not only pays tribute to Susan B. Anthony, but also specifically broaches the intersections and conflicts between race and gender in the differently marked statuses of outsiders to universal representation in U.S. life.176

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 174 Dr. Engelmann’s article appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Wineapple notes that Stein was probably responding to the article in the form of a lecture for one of her cousin Bird’s women’s groups (Wineapple 152). 175 Stein claimed that most women in her day did not realize that women would always be kept powerless in the male-dominated working world, and rather than advocating reform for women, she relegated them to the home, arguing that “maternity was the one area where women could not be outclassed by men.” 176 The internal contradictions of white female identity were, of course, no simpler on the European side of the “pond.” The problem manifested itself throughout western imperial nations, in historical, religious, scientific, and literary artifacts of the times, as well as in the work of Forster, Woolf, Josephine Baker, Joyce, Lawrence, the Dadaists, the Surrealists, in Gide and Proust, and in popular media, advertisements,

147 Though clearly (and appreciatively) benefiting from ultimate acceptance as

“white” (enough) in many circles (and in legal terms in the U.S.), what might complicate

Stein’s own problematic and conflicted status somewhat is that in addition to being subject to the general American prejudices against women and Jews around the turn of the century, Stein had experienced particularly hateful hostility as a Jewish woman in an elite white male world as a medical student at Hopkins.177 It is thus somewhat

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and so on. A stark and impressive portrait of the white English woman’s dilemma is offered by Virginia Woolf in one of her portraits of Mrs. Dalloway in her earliest novel, The Voyage Out (1914). We first read the patronizingly altruistic lament of Clarissa Dalloway commenting on her encounters with unseemly poverty: “It’s dreadful,” said Mrs. Dalloway, who, while her husband spoke, had been thinking. “When I’m with artists I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful, and then I go out into the streets and the first child I meet with its poor, hungry, dirty little face makes me turn round and say, ‘No, I can’t shut myself up—I won’t live in a world of my own. I should like to stop all the painting and writing and music until this kind of thing exists no longer.’ Don’t you feel,” she wound up, addressing Helen, “that life’s a perpetual conflict?” (41) Shortly thereafter, we are given a glimpse of Mrs. Dalloway’s letter to a friend: One does come across queer sorts as one travels. . . . It’s what I’ve always said about literary people— they’re far the hardest of any to get on with. . . . The man’s really delightful (if he’d cut his nails), and the woman has quite a fine face, only she dresses, of course, in a potato sack, and wears her hair like a Liberty shopgirl’s. They talk about art, and think us such poops for dressing in the evening. However, I can’t help that; I’d rather die than come in to dinner without changing—wouldn’t you? It matters ever so much more than the soup (It’s odd how things like that do matter so much more than what’s generally supposed to matter. I’d rather have my head cut off than wear flannel next the skin.) Then there’s a nice shy girl—poor thing—I wish one could rake her out before it’s too late...... there’s a dreadful little thing called Pepper. He’s just like his name. He’s indescribably insignificant, and rather queer in his temper poor dear. It’s like sitting down to dinner with an ill-conditioned fox-terrier, only one can’t comb him out, and sprinkle him with powder, as one would one’s dog. It’s a pity, sometimes, one can’t treat people like dogs! (46) The Dalloways and apparently many others in Woolf’s set show the inherent impossibility and absurdity of the white European woman’s tenuous status, given that her nation’s prosperity and her personal comfort were built largely on the treatment of non-Europeans as beasts of burden. 177 Wineapple describes some of the kinds of treatment that women in the Medical Program encountered: “The women knew they were the objects of some contempt. . . . a visiting nose-and-throat specialist tried to embarrass the women by dragging in ‘the dirtiest stories…’” Another German anatomist dismissed tedious model-making as “an excellent occupation for women and Chinamen” (Wineapple 124). One student described the hostile attitude of “the illustrious Dr. John Whitridge Williams” toward Stein: he “couldn’t stand [Gertrude’s] marked Hebrew looks, her sloppy work…” (Wineapple 124). And another classmate of Stein’s claimed that while other Jewish students were liked well enough, “[Stein] had the arrogant manner of many of her race, the disagreeable features, and was also very conceited” (124). Stein was also often described as a “Hebrew” or “Jewess” in the press after she became more well known.

148 understandable that, without denying her Jewishness, she actively “cultivated an image of herself as a wholesome American” (Daniel 82), as Jewish but for all intents and purposes also white.178 Stein knew, even in her later years as an American icon, that her

Jewishness kept her on the tenuous margins of “wholesome” American whiteness. Her apparent identification with such whiteness is not insignificant in itself, but rather than necessarily implying a self-distancing from her Jewish background, it could be read as a conflicted, strategic caution. It is evident in her writings that her aspiration to standard

American whiteness, involved a positive positioning of herself in contrastive relation to other “colored” Americans more than any denial of her Jewishness, a typical assimilative strategy among all marginally white Americans throughout the country’s history.179

The racial ambiguity of Jewish-Americans and anti-Semitic prejudices in the early twentieth-century notwithstanding, given that the most decisive judgments on the limits of whiteness were discernable along lines of generally socially acceptable reproductive mixing and supposed representational capacity beyond the particularity of one’s racial determination, the most strictly, violently, legally, and conceptually reinforced boundaries around whiteness most consequentially defined Jewish-Americans as white. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 178 Rather than disavowing her Jewish background, Stein rather seemed to show in her actions and obliquely (and openly—in that she publicly discussed the book as largely autobiographical) in The Making of Americans indicated that in her view Jewishness was simply assimilable to Euro-American identity. Given the palpably anti-Semitic atmosphere in both the U.S. and all over Europe at the time, Stein’s relative lack of public comment on her Jewishness is not necessarily indicative of indifference or disavowal. Her writings, correspondence, and conversation recounted by friends show that she always matter of factly identified with her Jewishness, and even considered it a contributing factor in her creative success. As Wineapple writes, Stein endorsed many of the popular Jewish stereotypes, including the complimentary ones; among other things she would “associate both genius and depression with Jews” and argue that Jews were “intellectually superior” (57-58). Biographer Lucy Daniel writes that in 1928, Stein apparently described herself to her nephew as “the most famous Jew in the world” (quoted from Daniel 82). 179 More commentary with regard to Curtis Marez’s relevant work on Wilde in my discussion of Tender Buttons.

149 Most at stake in racial and nation-defining terms in this era (as now), were white anxieties regarding crossings along the enduring black and white divide, and the looming Asian invasion,180 especially on the West Coast and with regard to the “little brown men” of newly acquired islands. In this context, especially in contradistinction to the more intensely vilified and representationally color-contrasted yellow Chinamen (and Japs) and Afro-Americans, American Jews happened to generally fall on the right side of white. Despite the unstable and varied history of racial discourse and terminology among the different American writers, scientists, and “authorities” on race, racialization in the

U.S. nevertheless held to relatively consistent determining principles.181 The most significant divisions, scientifically, historically, politically, and perceptually, I would argue, came down to the fundamental triad of racial groupings recognized by Georges

Cuvier, Ruth Benedict, and others, in terms of the colored categories white, yellow, and black, with a special status reserved for the ennobled (because increasingly rare, since eradicated and legally eradicable) “Red.” Ultimately, the most significant ontological and epistemological categorization, both in U.S. history and European imperial history and nationalisms, remained the color distinction between the white citizen-Subject and the distinctly non-white, or colored body, the crossing of which would defy the racial rules of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 180 See Almaguer, Boas, Brodkin, Daniels, and Jacobson.

181 In dealing with the problem of defining the limits of whiteness, several key court cases throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries gave Supreme Court Justices (clearly reflecting the point of view of the educated white male) the power to designate the parameters of whiteness according to the putatively universal, common sense notions of the white everyman. Thus Justice Sutherland in 1923 would argue that South Asians were clearly not white according to “contemporary popular standards” attributed to the “average man” (Lee 143). He stated that “the average man” was well aware of the “unmistakable and profound differences” between South Asians and Western Europeans (Lee 143).

150 amalgamation.182 In all immigrant legislation through most of the twentieth century, and in court case after court case, before and throughout Stein’s lifetime, what most mattered was whether or not one could ultimately be considered “white”; and while Jews, other

Eastern and Southern Europeans, and the Irish did encounter hostility from “native” whites, they also benefited from the substantial whitening effect of more drastically othered “red,” “black,” and “yellow” bodies.183

Through the late nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, discussions of racial

“amalgamation” and designations of certain sets of “amalgable” races were central in the muddled discourses that determined the strict sexual-reproductive boundaries that defined and protected American whiteness. Racial or cultural amalgamation was perhaps the most commonly preferred term used “to stand for marriage relations among different !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 182 As George Fredrickson, Alexander Saxton, Matthew Frye Jacobson, Robert Wiebe, W.E.B. Du Bois, Henry Yu, Omi & Winant, Reginald Horsman, Goldberg, and many others have demonstrated, immigrants and indigenous “Natives” were offered citizenship insofar as they were perceivably white or willing to become a whitened citizen-Subject. The ultimate deciding factor in racial categorization tended to align with the “common sense” interpretations of the 1790 Naturalization Act, which limited citizenship to the flexible but exclusive category of “free white persons” (Almaguer 24, Daniel 114, Goldberg 179, Omi & Winant 82), namely those of discernable European background. One indication of the growing all- inclusive nature of Euro-whiteness is seen in the dynamics of the 1912 election. Whereas Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson was known for white supremicist attitudes, his campaign required that he “repudiate over and over again the contemptuous phrases he had written about southern and eastern European immigrants” in his earlier writings. He countered hostile accusations by “lavishing admiration on the Poles, the Italians, and others” (Higham 190). 183 A series of US naturalization cases between 1890 and 1925 bears out . . . .the judiciary’s struggle over racial admission and belonging, and so explicitly over the scope and character of whiteness. . . . The naturalization cases grapple openly and tortuously with whom are to count as white and therefore naturalizable as American citizens. The language of exclusion is explicitly and for the most part unapologetically racial, the significance heightened against the background of America’s imperial expansionism at the time. (Goldberg 179). Goldberg also comments: We find in the . . . . changing US censal categories of race one constant. This is the administrative imperative to track the threat of heterogeneity, and to massage the boundaries of whiteness and negritude, expanding or contracting them in response to the pragmatics of the perceived threat of demographic politics. Where the culture of whiteness – the norms and values, presuppositions and practices, the social and political order for which it stood – was considered threatened, racial administrology sought to soften the effects. . . . Throughout the history of US racial enumeration, whites have always been counted as a racially coherent and undifferentiated group. (Goldberg 190) Also see Sucheng Chan (93) on court’s refusal of granting Ozawa white status in 1922.

151 ethnic groups deemed white” (Lee 76). Just as, for Alice Toklas in her account of French cuisine, butter stood in cooking for that which best “marries” distinct flavors, but was only to be used for combinations of flavors that could appropriately and acceptably, perhaps naturally, “amalgamate,” the relatively neutral term came to be associated in

U.S. discourse with acceptable and non-offensive mixing in inter-ethnic or inter-racial (as with relationships between whites and Native Americans) sexual, marital, reproductive relations.184 By the later half of the nineteenth century, racial “amalgamation” was commonly used to refer to the smooth familial, marital, and reproductive integration of latterly arrived Euro-ethnics; as a popular term to describe “interethnic and interracial marriage,” it “implied the absorption of the Other into the People” (Lee 76).

Proponents of anti-miscegenation laws and stricter immigration regulation consistently used the term to mark the racial compatibility of groups that purportedly could mix, or “amalgamate,” without racially and biologically degenerative reproductive results. As various marginalized European immigrant groups encountered hostility from

“native” groups and attempted to assimilate, the notion that they were essentially racial and biological kin to “Teutonic” or “Anglo-Saxon” Euro-Americans, essentially able to be “amalgamated” into American whiteness, was key to their primary identification as included in or close-enough-to generically “white.” Irish and Jewish immigrants who

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 184 Along with the somewhat marginalized “ethnic” European immigrants, Native Americans were by the turn of the century seen as profitably and naturally amalgamable with the white majority population. Asian and black others were thus the only racial groups that ultimately stood apart as irreducibly different in body and being, in contradistinction to these “amalgamable” groups. This popularly determined racial principal was broadly embraced both by the public and the legal system. One Supreme Court ruling in the 1920s explicitly (and tautologically) evoked this sexual-reproductive limit as essential to racial definition and the parameters of whiteness. The court would claim that only those groups who were “readily amalgamated” into the (white) “American” population could be defined as “white” (Lee 76, 143).

152 faced some racial discrimination, for instance, were thus ultimately defined as white because they were “unquestionably kin to those already here [in the U.S.],” and because

“their physical amalgamation with the Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority” was seen as both biologically and legally acceptable (if not ideal, to some); blacks and Asians in particular were marked by “unmistakable and profound differences” (Lee 76, 143).185 As striking evidence of the strategically differential uses of color and exclusion, it is notable !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 185 In the intensely anti-Asian, anti-Chinese, and then increasingly anti-Japanese sentiment of the turn of the century and the early twentieth century in the U.S., (in part because Afro-Americans were considered basically American rather than foreign), Asians stood out as the utterly Other foreigners who could neither culturally assimilate, nor effectively marry into and biologically mix with whites, and they tended to incite the most strident cries of “They do not amalgamate” during periods in which Americans called for increased, strict, and indefinitely long exclusion of Asians from the country. Intermarriage between whites and Asians was intensely “frowned upon” especially in the Western states, and by 1905, the Civil Code in California was “amended so as to make the marriage of white persons with Mongolians, as well as with negroes and mulattoes, illegal and void” (Millis 274). In contrast to Afro-Americans, Asians, and Asian- Americans, by the late nineteenth century in the U.S., Native Americans were increasingly viewed as specially admissible and “amalgamable” though they were still distinctly racialized; by the turn of the century most whites, Roosevelt included, welcomed “the prospect of amalgamation with the Indians” (Handlin 21). Native Americans had formerly been among the most demonized, seen as most savage and removed from civilization and humanity earlier in the nineteenth century (Almaguer 6). (California had, for instance, offered rewards from the state government for every Native American scalp (Iris Chang 25).) See also Almaguer, Katanski, Hutchinson and Pfister. A sudden bubbling of moral scrupulosity (or sensitivity to outer scrutiny) in the last decades of the nineteenth century precluded the ongoing use of a national extermination policy, but the boarding-school assimilation movement still aimed for a certain annihilation of the “Red Indian” as racially conceived threat—the general aim of the schools being to “kill the Indian to save the man” (Katanski 3). (This was the stated philosophy of Richard Henry Pratt, who founded the prototype Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1879. (Katanski 2)). Perhaps partly due to their severely diminished numbers later in the century, Native Americans posed less of a threat to white racial integrity. (One report from the Board of Indian Commissioners in 1880 noted, for instance “(with evident disappointment),” that the “Indian” was “destined to live as long as the white race, or until he becomes absorbed and assimilated with his pale brethren” (Katanski 3). But it is difficult to imagine that any comparably small Asian or Afro-American population would have been embraced in such familial terms as assimilable “brethren” to the “pale” white race, and thus absorbable through marriage.) It was taken for granted, however, that any perceivable trace of Indian-ness had to be eradicated, that their sense of communal “tribal affiliation” especially had to be dissolved (Katanski 7). Viewed simply as raw material to be made into (usable) citizens, they were figured by one steel executive as comparable to the raw “red ore” that had to be worked and transformed into “commodifiable steel” (Pfister 41). U.S. policy held that Native Americans conform to a Western ontological grammar that assumed a sense of abstracted representative subjecthood, individualist property-owning propensity, and willingness to conform to a capitalist wage labor system as the natural order of things. Resistance to such policies and attitudes was read as simply savage, incomprehensible resistance to “fundamentally human” values. (Joel Pfister discusses in depth in his study Individuality Incorporated the primary agenda of the boarding schools to instill a sense of U.S. liberal democratic, capitalist individuality as part of the assimilation process.)

153 that the term “miscegenation,” which marked decisively unacceptable racial mixing (in contradistinction to the more neutral “amalgamation”), was popularized by Irish

American pamphleteers as a means of favorably “whitening” the Irish, who were still on the margins of whiteness at the time.186

As Gunnar Myrdal has pointed out, in the early twentieth century, the “chief fear of the white American male was that the blacks sought ‘amalgamation’ and that Negro men had designs on ‘his’ women” (Lyman 186). Late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century stereotypes figured the Afro-American as an “oversexed ‘brute,’” characterized by “sexual madness and excess” (Fredrickson 277, 279). Over the course of the late nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century, up to thirty-nine states in the U.S. “had at one time or another enacted miscegenation statutes” (Lyman 187).

There were also various calls for an “anti-miscegenation” amendment to be made to the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 186 Robert Lee recounts that “amalgamation” was used throughout the nineteenth century—at times to reference ethnic assimilation or absorption, but primarily to designate reproductive “intermarriage” and “physical amalgamation” with the Euro-American “white” population (76). Lee explains that the term “miscegenation” was popularized specifically by “two Irish immigrant anti-abolitionists” (who still faced “substantial social barriers”) in 1863; their fake abolitionist tract capitalized on national obsessions with racial mixing and attributed to abolitionists a purported plan for “forced intermarriage between Irish and blacks” (76)—the prospect of which was scandalous to Southern and Northern whites alike. (Critics of abolition had accused abolitionists of being “amalgamationists” as early as the 1830s, but the term “amalgamation” still remained relatively neutral and ambiguous (Lee 76).) Lee remarks that it is “no surprise that the neologism ‘miscegenation’” was endorsed by Irish immigrants and “purposely coined . . . . to express, in negative, pseudoscientific terms, the unacceptable nature of sexual relations between races”; the more negatively charged circulation of “miscegenation” rendered other relations among groups “deemed white” more acceptable as neutral “amalgamation” (76). In his focus on the early Chinese presence on the East Coast, Tchen also describes some of the strategically differential dynamics of anti-Chinese racialization among the Irish in the region’s popular culture: Irish New Yorkers played a key role in fighting for the broadening of the Anglo-American identity and for the formation of a new pan-European race of “whites.” By emphasizing Irish humanness and exaggerating African and Chinese differences within the given parameters of New York commercial culture, Irish performers were able to recreate themselves in the eyes of the greater society. . . . their “otherness” could be reified in the United States into a pan-European American whiteness, precisely because of the existence of African Americans and Chinese who could be reconstituted as “others” to the Irish. (Tchen 222).

154 Constitution. Even Walt Whitman, written into the national books as a democratic voice for the American everyman, and admired by Stein (frequently gestured to in her writing with the numerous plays on Leaves of Grass— “leaves of,” “leaves in grass,” “leaves,” etc.), in addition to advocating white expansion across the continent, had earlier publicly denounced cross-racial sexual relations and the idea that “Whites and Blacks” could

“ever amalgamate in America” (Saxton 154).187 Such beliefs had only intensified among

Americans toward the turn of the century. Even among the most progressive of the period, such as Theodore Roosevelt, there was a “race consciousness” concern that social reforms and increased contact between the races should not encourage “too close an association with other races, at least not to the point of amalgamation” (Sinkler 8).188

As a ubiquitous word-ingredient throughout Stein’s writing, and an equally ubiquitous and essentially dear substance at Stein’s table, butter is a surprisingly evocative and apposite material for Stein, a much-loved pet-word and a figure of irreducible singularity and originary difference. It is always more than and also not itself.

Interestingly, Stein’s writing raises the distinctly contradictory, or multiple, possibilities of butter. It is at once that of which the flavor is irreplaceable, as necessarily singular spread, which is not only distinguishable from imitation spreads (perhaps not to everyone, but to myself and many other food-lovers) but also as the authentic and

“natural” “real thing” clearly distinguishable according to a wide range of varying quality !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 187 Whitman had written an article in 1858 celebrating the new state constitution of Oregon in its exclusion of blacks as both good and natural: “Who believes that Whites and Blacks can ever amalgamate in America? Or who wishes it to happen? Nature has set an impassable seal against it. Besides, is not America for the Whites? And is it not better so?” (Daily Eagle, 6 May 1858, quoted in Saxton 154). 188 Popular journals in the decades around the turn of the century were filled with articles on the inferiority of the “simian”-like “lower races,” and the “Impossibility of Race Amalgamation” (Sinkler 23).

155 and flavor (by the discerning palate). It is also that which, especially in baking, but also in sauce-making and other aspects of cooking, that which irreplaceably “marries” and even enhances distinct flavors, enabling the heightened being of that which is not itself.

While it is that which covers, at times opaquely, that upon which it is spread, as essentially supplement, extra skin perhaps, it is also that which (at least visually) disappears into other substances as a cooking ingredient. As butter’s distinct historical and socio-political resonances invoke the taboo mixing of different races and the phenomenon of racial “passing” (especially with regard to Afro-Americans and their potentially undetectable blackness, and Asians with their enduring yellowness), it also enfigures the opposing paradigm of the “proper” blending and marrying of flavors, or the socially desirable mixing and absorption of colored races (as with the “red” Native

Americans in the U.S., or also in certain French colonial attitudes, at least for a time in

Indochina, where the creation of a mixed-race, French-educated administrative class was seen for some years as a favorable barrier against possible revolt by the colonized189). In being both textually and materially malleable, oppositional in its constitution and character (again, as in both irreplaceable and yet also substitutable in a certain light), butter is a particularly productive (and evocative of the reproductive) site for Stein’s textual enactment of utter, unelidable difference.

Read in the light of the historical and linguistic-historical contexts above, the rich

“amalgamative” and “miscegenative” potential running through Stein’s uses of butter, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 189 Christina Firpo discusses in her article, “Crises of Whiteness and Empire in Colonial Indochina” the French government’s policy of systematically removing “Eurasian” children from their (Vietnamese) mothers and placing them in French-run orphanages in order to raise subjects that would be “culturally French and loyal to the colonial government” (588).

156 color, and race thus seem to suggest a loose, open, but somewhat unifying convergence of concerns or residual matter, a perhaps loosely cohering “mud” or “muddled” mold that that enables and enriches Stein’s artistic, creative, sensual, flavor-ful, and thoroughly personal engagement with the paradoxes of identity, difference, embodiment, and thinking. The enduring materiality and important sensuous textures and feelings of both the body (perhaps the racialized body par excellence) and of butter (as significantly substantive and, as it happens, figurative/associative material) seem to stand out for her as someone supremely interested in the multiplicious potential of sounds, colors, textures, and especially the human word. Her literary-aesthetic appropriation of “butter” as word and figure engages issues of aesthetic form and “taste,” in ways that challenge high- culture’s denigration the sensual, flavorful, and non-disinterested aesthetic pleasures.

Stein attends to the universal importance and formally significant being of the utterly singular phenomenality (and flavor) of such things as butter, playful word compositions, and the erotic encounter highlights gestures toward potentially new and non-hierarchical grammars or creative spaces. And her exploration of both the obstructions and possibilities of representation open up the movements of condensation and abstraction evoked by the word in both its significatory modes and its opacities.

Interestingly, perhaps inevitably, Stein’s writing seems to show that given the limitations of representation, identification, thought, and the language we have available to us, it is perhaps impossible, or was at least for her, to think through such problems without re-subjugating the racial as limit and drawing from the rich “fungibility”

(Hartman 19) and intriguing opacity of the necessary racial trace as the path to otherness

157 and (“twentieth-century,” modernist) newness apart from the same/self and the representationally familiar. Her constant reliance on this racial trace as central to her notion of herself as a writer and innovator, and its pervasive intertwining with the form, substance, and word “butter” is noticeable not only in the primarily notably

“experimental” writings mentioned above (mostly from the 1910s and 20s), but also in key writings that straddle both conventionally narrative and representationally-resistant modes in later years.

Not only in Stein’s writing, but as is well known, in her very household and everyday living, the presence and usefulness of the racialized (and gendered) body for her creative work was explicit. As biographers have noted and Stein also recounted, she and

Toklas had numerous cooks and servants living with them over the years, and many of these just happened to be Asian, “Indo-Chinese“ or “Hindoo-Chinese” from the French colonies, to be specific, and most were markedly ethnicized, if not racialized.190 Stein’s depiction and use of these servants, two of whom, Trac and Nguyen (called Nyen by

Stein) she engages in her writing, further elucidate Stein’s troubled, problematic conception or race and relation to racial others. In the following chapters I will discuss the intertwining of “butter” and race in Stein’s uses of the Oriental and other bodies of color, first in Tender Buttons, and then in later writings that employ the essential contributions and figures of the Indochinese servant.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 190 Though Stein mentions only two Indochinese servants by name in her writing, Toklas mentions in her Cookbook that they had employed many different Indochinese servants and cooks over the years.

158 Chapter 4 Race and “The Rhythm of the Visible World”

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.

An ordinary color, a color is that strange mixture. . . . Spread it all and arrange the white place… Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

Le capiton demande au tapissier d’ameublement un travail minutieux sur son mobilier afin d’obtenir des capitons réguliers mais également une bonne maîtrise de la tapisserie afin d’obtenir des capitons fermes. C’est cette densité qui rend le capitonnage esthétique. . . . Il ne faut pas coudre les plis de tissu de couverture, c’est la tension qui forme les plis. Logiquement plus le capiton est creux et plus les plis sont profonds et bien formés. Valerie Pizzi, « La garniture capitonnée »

Written in the early 1910s (manuscript notebooks dated 1913, published 1914), when Stein was well into exploring her increasingly disjunctive, less conventionally representational modes, and also enjoying her relatively new romance with Alice Toklas,

Tender Buttons is among the most popular and impressive of Stein’s “difficult” non- narrative writings. Its appeal is understandable given its playfulness (even giddy at times) with language, familiar domestic contexts, and insistently erotic undertones, along with its loose but noticeable thematic and compositional continuity. As a playground for

Stein’s upending of conventional representation and exploration of “new,” “twentieth- century” writing, Tender Buttons foregrounds semantic and syntactic subversions, unexpected word-placements, and breakdown of common usages. Though weighted in its attention to “rhythm of the visible world” and its own seductive rhythms (The

159 Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas), its engaging readability as a text, “[t]he end of which is that there is a suggestion” (Tender Button 44), “marries” the material contours and impressions of the word with open-ended significatory suggestiveness. Here, as in much of her other work, Stein upsets and ruptures expected modes of representation, and explores the extent to which words can shake loose referential antecedents and assert their own materiality, unsettling conceptual meaning yet without being completely rendered from sense, mingling with the intuitive and inchoate realm of feeling.191

Stein’s multiply suggestive, varyingly opaque use of language in Tender Buttons explores the limits of representation and the possibilities of suggesting oblique yet provocative relations, resemblances, and differentials. Notwithstanding its heavily disjointed tendencies, it is also a surprisingly connective text that intimates domestic scenes and exploits the dynamic aspects of viewing and existing beside (a notably metonymically-leaning text, as other critics have noted), without expecting definitive clarity or translatable identification among objects and words, between the artist and the object, or between the reader and the text. While its somewhat opaque surface calls attention to the material quality and semantic indeterminacy of the language used, Tender

Buttons is neither dismissible as mere nonsense, nor thoroughly decodable as riddle, love poem, or manifesto, though it may be a bit of all these. Stein’s writerly love for words

(as points of dynamic confluence of and tension between matter and meaning) has been made clear in many of her conversations and lectures, in her discussions of the function

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 191 Stein insisted in “A Transatlantic Interview” and implied in her lectures that her writing was not entirely non-representational or void of discernible sense. She acknowledged having tried and failed in using words as mere textual material completely separated from sense and cognitive associations.

160 and feeling of nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives, and sentences for instance in her

Lectures in America. In Tender Buttons, we find her mix of innovative soundings of queer love and domestic life continually interwoven with and dynamically slanting our familiar associations with the words at hand.

Many scholars, including Marjorie Perloff, Stephen Scobie, Peter Quartermain, and Jayne Walker, who have meaningfully elucidated various innovative compositional aspects of Tender Buttons, have acknowledged that the text’s playfulness reflects not only Stein’s exposure to cubist painting of the period around 1910–12 but also the newfound joys of Stein’s private life with Alice Toklas.192 Some critics who have focused more on the subversive queer, erotic, or feminist aspects of the text have shed light on overall thematic valences and potential personal references throughout the suggestive text. While much criticism on Tender Buttons that has emphasized Stein’s radical challenge to norms regarding gender and sexuality has helped to interpret moments in the text which invite clearly erotic or socially subversive readings, these discussions have also left aside other prominently insistent compositional elements, most notably regarding the text’s engagement with the racial. Few critics have noted that even as Stein challenges certain social norms, the singularity of Tender Buttons is in part constituted by, rather than being separable from, the rough non-elidability of these touchy

(“tender” perhaps?) textual moments that raise the problem of race, representation, and racism.193 Yetta Howard’s recent commentary on how what she reads as the intimations

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

193 Amidst the wealth of commentary on Tender Buttons, Josephine Nock-Hee Park, Yetta Howard, and Deborah Mix are among the few who have critically engaged with the textual relevance and significance of

161 of an “ugly,” “unromantic” non-heteronormative sexuality in Tender Buttons are necessarily linked to the “raw sexuality” associated with “non-white primitive otherness” and the pejoratively figured non-white (especially black) female body is rare and significant in its acknowledgement of the intertwining of the subjugation of gender and deviant sexuality with the racialized body in the text.

There has been much commentary on the multiplicity of textual and erotic suggestiveness of the playful title, “Tender Buttons,” in which we hear “tend her buttons” and more. If we open ourselves up to further latent readings of the title in the spirit of

Steinese, we also find graphic and phonic traces of “butter” in “buttons.” And if we consider trans-lingual plays as well,194 we might think of “tendres boutons” or “boutons tendres” (with its own French-erotic resonances), which might even resonate with

“boutons d’or”—which happens to be the French reference for “buttercup” flowers, also called “fleur de beurre” (and Butterblume in German). The numerous cultural plays on the color of butter in “buttercup,”195 especially in terms of the reflection of the flower’s

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! race, racial epithets, racialization, and potentially racism in the more troubling moments in Tender Buttons and other writings. Deborah Mix has commented on Harryette Mullen’s revisionist responses to Tender Buttons; Josephine Park has primarily discussed “Susie Asado,” a moment in Tender Buttons, and the “Chinamen” line in Four Saints in Three Acts. Yetta Howard has looked at the manifestations of the “ugly” of lesbian sexuality in the text via Stein’s use of primitivism. In her dissertation, Ugly Dykes: Pejorative Identities and the Anti-Aesthetics of Lesbianism, Howard reads Tender Buttons alongside Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem and insightfully discusses the particularly charged implications of the title and the distinct, though oblique, soundings in the text of lesbian sexuality and the gendered, sexualized and racialized body. 194 Stein scholars including Ulla Dydo and Marjorie Perloff have already demonstrated the element of cross-lingual turns as part of Stein’s textual play, as in “a hole is a trou” and the rhythmic, phonic, and semantic resonances between “Roast potatoes for” (33) of Tender Buttons and the common French expression for roast potatoes “pommes de terre au four.” 195 David Lloyd has mentioned that it is a common for children in Britain to play a game of holding buttercups under their chin—if the yellow of the flower was reflected on the chin, it was taken to mean that the person liked butter (perhaps excessively?). Apparently, this broadly Western-European tradition

162 color on the skin lends to the title, from multiple angles, all the racially evocative implications of “buttons” to “butter,” “boutons d’or,” and “buttercup.” As Hortense

Spillers, Fred Moten, Judith Halberstam, James Wilson, and others have argued, any serious consideration of gender- and sexual-subjugation must consider the ways in which the sexualized and gendered body is also always already racialized, and that racial- subjugation is always implicit in the historically and ontologically pejorative characterization of the female body and the material. In such light, the body implicit in

“tender buttons” is also always a somewhat raced body, and we might read in “tender buttons” the sore “buttons” of racializing and racist-sounding moments in the text.

Further consideration of “buttons” in other suggestive figurative terms (as in the idiomatic sense of annoyingly “pushing” someone’s “buttons”) also brings up the particularly sensitive and “tender,” personally and intuitively impactive, and especially meaning-ful significatory and loaded character of particular words, spots, and acts.196 In this light, we might read the title as also highlighting the reality and importance of that which is singularly and personally provocative in ways that exceed or bypass relatively communicatively stable, universal modes of reference and signification. Here we might consider that elusive feelings, various areas of “act,” and diversely meaning-loaded words or constructions may (like such idiomatic “buttons”) be far from insignificant, textually loaded and experience-shaping “buttons” of sorts. Explicit race-referential

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! carried over to the States as well. The game was mentioned in William Wells Newell’s 1884 collection Games and Songs of American Children (108). 196 Yetta Howard (in her dissertation) and David Lloyd (in conversation) are, I believe, among the few who have noted the potentially negative resonances of the soreness potentially implicit in the “tender” of the title.

163 words and epithets in the text, for instance, might work as “tender” (as in particularly sensitive or sore) spots for various readers, provoking them/us and animating, moving and pushing surrounding text and words throughout the piece in profound and important ways. Given its notable “American” air and idiom, we might even say that the various

“tender buttons” (simultaneously textual, sexual, and racial) of Tender Buttons could be

“read” (and also particularly “red”) as touching on the national American “sore spot” par excellence, that of its both unspeakable and everywhere sounded and signifying racial drama and trauma.

For the most part, the pronounced race-related resonances throughout Tender

Buttons, beyond the “DINNER” passage (36), have been almost entirely overlooked. The significance of the racial in the work involves but also extends well beyond the mere fact of the appearance of racial epithets such as “nigger” (36) or “Chinamen” (45) in the text, which, as the most abrasive moments in the text, have often been noticed but also at times dismissed as anomalous and irrelevant to the rest of the piece.197 Some consideration of the possibility of ironic or potentially anti-racist transforming intentions in these occurrences, or of the possibility of their thoroughly disjointed and unconnected singularity (in relation to the rest of the text) may be somewhat reasonable, given the unconventional slant of the entire piece. However, within the context of other largely overlooked elements of the text, as well as the (characteristically Steinian) intertextually

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 197 As one critic who has attempted to address the problematic nature of these moments, Deborah Mix discusses the importance of Harryette Mullen’s poetic and critical responses to and revisions of the racialized and racist aspects she has found in Tender Buttons. For Mix, the sort of work in the “transracial signifying” of Stein that Mullen performs is important in continuing to read and reflect on Stein’s “radical interventions.”

164 resonant repetition of race-evoking terms throughout Stein’s writings, elements of the racial here seem far from inconsequential or isolated. Rather, it seems that the ways in which these terms and moments of the text work (compositionally) significantly inform

Stein’s exploration of the limits of representation throughout Tender Buttons and amny other pieces in her corpus.

The very structure of Tender Buttons, as a series of passages under various headings, serves as a structural and overarching evocation of the paradoxes of race and all modes of typology (especially in conjunction with the individual passages mentioned below), in that it persistently invokes processes of categorization even as the obliquely associative, divergent progression (or lack thereof) of the text challenges the notion that language is a simply transparent or definitive means of referential “pointing.” Whereas a

“system of pointing” would set a specific tone for the piece with reference to a straightforward constitutive relation between some “system” and the function of

“pointing,” a system “to pointing” displaces the standard constitutive definition with an associative relation of oblique contiguity.

If language is a system of pointing then the entire system, and the text of Tender

Buttons, points to the referential process of pointing itself, with its necessary elisions and reductive condensations. Stein characteristically suggests that words or other elements of any “arrangement” or “system” at best gesture toward the process of “pointing,” rather than adequately encapsulating or embodying meaning. As it announces the loose gesturing in its “system to pointing” above, the text also tellingly opens with the resonating announcement that “[t]he difference is spreading.” This phrase (both in spirit

165 and placement) dynamically frames Tender Buttons not only as aesthetically pioneering, but also as meaningfully interactive with Stein’s personal life, her dominant preoccupations, and her other writings (not least in its evocation of the literally and intertextually rich ties between “spreading” with “butter”). Stein wrote Tender Buttons, Two, and Jenny, Hannah… all within the years from 1910–1912, so it is not surprising that these texts would be particularly resonant with each other and other “portraits” produced in the same period.

On one level, difference spreads (as butter/spread) as the words of Tender Buttons resist containment within the process of representation, proliferating messily in, beside, and beyond identity.198 Stein’s own interests in American identity and race also continually evoke in “difference” associations with the nearly hysterical national obsession with racial “difference” in the U.S.199 For white Americans in the early twentieth century, and arguably for Stein as well, the most prominent and disturbing embodiment of utterly incommensurable “difference” capable of “spreading” in their midst were racially other “Orientals” and “black folk.” The “spreading” of difference simultaneously gestures toward the promising creative “difference” launched in the centrifugal workings of Tender Buttons and also the invasive threat of the racial other as

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 198 As David Lloyd has helpfully pointed out to me, “spreading” here as a portmanteau word (a fittingly Steinian mode of playfulness on the level of the word itself), also contains the word “reading” and thus further emphasizes the disseminating activity of the text and language as ever deferring, internally differentiated and unsettled. This is another characteristically Steinian foregrounding of Derridean differance avant la lettre. 199 In addition to her strong sense of personal identification as an American, and her repeated assertions of such (rather patriotic) identification, Stein’s correspondence also consistently shows evidence of her awareness of and concern for contemporary goings-on in the U.S. In particular, close ties to friends in New York, Boston, and Baltimore kept the Steins well connected to U.S. life and lastingly tied to its internationally resounding racial drama.

166 the source of diseased contagium.200 The evocation of the threat of racial degeneration or

“miscegenation” here through difference “spreading” also interestingly converges with all the racial resonances of butter as a singular “spread” threatened by the “spreading” of other inferior but increasingly ubiquitous spreads.

All these multiple threads of signification occur in the opening lines of Tender

Buttons, and they set the tone for all the suggestive language play to follow. Just as key moments in “Jenny, Helen, Hannah, Paul and Peter” acknowledge the arbitrarily assigned valuations of color with regard to the identification of butter and the attribution of race,

Tender Buttons, in its own ways also destabilizes the assignation of values to relative or arbitrary differences in color while also keeping obliquely related representations of race in play. Repeated appearances of “dirt” and colors, for instance, tend to subvert notions of impropriety and value associated with colors, darkness, and the “dirty.” Near the opening of the first section, “OBJECTS,” in “A PIECE OF COFFEE,” the sentence,

“Dirty is yellow” (5), invites multiple readings potentially devaluing “dirty” or “yellow,” but it also suggests the valueless appearance of dirt as assignable to some particular, arbitrary shade on the color spectrum.201 Though the frequency of color words in Tender

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 200 In her insightful readings of Stein’s “Orients,” Josephine Nock-Hee Park has also noted the racial significance in “The difference is spreading” here in Tender Buttons. 201 In the next segment, “DIRT AND NOT COPPER,” we read that dirt “makes a color darker,” an assertion that has potentially negative or neutral valences, but the subsequent statement that it also “makes mercy and relaxation and even a strength to spread [that word again] a table fuller” suggests a positive freedom and pleasure via “relaxation” and a “fuller” table. The varied uses of repeated color-related words in the text highlight the plasticity of both words and apparently simple identities as concretely connotative yet laughably abstract, as specifically descriptive yet so arbitrary as to be practically non-descript. For instance, numerous evocations of color at the beginning of “OBJECTS,” (as in references to “a red thing,” “a white thing,” “yellow,” a “whiter” “mixture,” “coal color,” “lily white,” “colored china,” and “a game in green”) meaningfully gesture toward a variegated and contrastive visual field while also shunning any attempt at conventional description. Other strange formulations—such as “Cut cut in white, cut in white so lately” in “A PLATE”; “only a white and red are black, only a yellow and green are blue, a pink is scarlet”

167 Buttons is by not reducible to racial reference, the predominance of words marking differing shades and “darkness” nevertheless allows them to resonate with and amplify the more explicit references to racialized categories here and in other writings.

The whimsically unconventional placement of these color words and other signifiers in the somewhat opaque passages of Tender Buttons serves to render indeterminate the effects of their appearance in the text, even with regard to the racial, but they are nevertheless suggestive. Overall, as many scholars and critics have noted, the text occupies an impressively induced realm of rich suggestiveness rather than falling into nonsense or the complete “gibberish” many of Stein’s contemporaries accused her of, as we can see in the following sampling of passages from each major section:

Winged, to be winged means that white is yellow and pieces pieces that are brown are dust color if dust is washed off. . . . (“A BOX” 7)

If the speed is open, if the color is careless, if the selection of a strong scent is not awkward, if the button holder is held by all the waving color and there is no color, not any color. (“A PIANO” 9)

A season in yellow sold extra strings makes lying places. (“COLD CLIMATE” 12)

The sudden spoon is the wound in the decision. (“MALACHITE” 12)

Coloring high means that the strange reason is in front not more in front behind. (“AN UMBRELLA” 12)202 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! in “A LONG DRESS”; or “all the yellow has discrimination” from “FOOD”—vaguely gesture toward the ways in which words and colors are materially specific yet non-descript, constructed functions of social custom and “discrimination.” 202 Such unconventional constructions pervade the text, and the examples are endless: “Come and say what prints all day. A whole few watermelon. There is no pope. . . . A little lace makes boils.” (“A LITTLE CALLED PAULINE” 15); “Cooking, cooking is the recognition between sudden and nearly sudden very little and all large holes” (“MILK” 30); “A reason for bed is this, that a decline, any decline is poison, poison is a toe a toe extractor, this means a solemn change” (“SAUSAGES” 33); “Dining is west” (“DINING” 36); “Act so that there is no use in a centre.. . . Explaining darkening and expecting relating is all of a piece.. . . The sister was not a mister. . . . Alike and a snail, this means Chinamen, it does there is

168

Go red go red, laugh white./ Suppose a collapse in rubbed purr, in rubbed purr get. (“SUPPOSE AN EYES” 16)

Darkness, very dark darkness is sectional. . . . . The reason that there is a suggestion in vanity is due to this that there is a burst of mixed music. (“MUTTON” 25)

“A curving example makes righteous finger-nails. (“ROOMS” 51)

While traditional readerly expectations are thwarted here, even at the level of simple syntax, the text remains in the realm of the readable. Phrases like the following: “white way of being round,” “a sad size,” “sudden spoon,” “coloring high,” “a toe extractor,” and “a curving example,” enact disruptive but flexibly engaging and provocative progressions of words. And the notion of the “example” as “curving” (“ROOMS”), for instance, is suggestive of the concrete obliqueness of language in the text, a surprising store of “suggestion in [seeming] vanity” (“MUTTON”).

In the “MUTTON” passage above, we also find an overt emphasis on the internal disparity of the text, as composed of unlike elements, as well as another suggestion of the text’s potential race-related inflections in the mention of a “burst of mixed music”

(“MUTTON”). Here, the text underlines the distinct musicality and internally disparate newness of Stein’s language in Tender Buttons and elsewhere, with its unsettling of language as discursively communicative and its plays with meaningful yet non- ratiocinative “order,” “arrangement,” form, and rhythm. And if Tender Buttons is read as

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! no doubt that to be right is more than perfect there is no doubt and glass is confusing it confuses the substance which was of a color. . . . The change is mercenary that settles whitening the coloring and serving dishes where there is metal and making yellow any yellow every color in a shade which is expressed in a tray.. . . A curving example makes righteous finger-nails. . . . (“ROOMS” 43–51)

169 a strident “burst of mixed music,” it is indeed “mixed” in that it is full of contrasts not only in its successions of strange word combinations, but also in its mixed construction on the border between literary text and music, aesthetic unity and chaos, and sense and nonsense. Its description as “mixed” also inevitably brings to mind the American obsession with racial mixing at the time, and possibly compositional influences that are possibly racially inflected in their differentiation (including the suggestions of “white” reason mixing with putatively “black” or “dark” sources of innovation and creativity, as in Picasso’s creative consideration of African masks).

These various aspects of Tender Buttons, which highlight textual instability and draw attention to unsettled fields of elemental aggregates over clear concepts, along with the opening announcement of “spreading” “difference” (3) give a consistently playful slant to the entire piece and importantly contextualize and interact with the text’s more pointed mention of racialized groups and inclusion of racial epithets. Such textual playfulness and experimentation with language is what potentially problematizes or destabilizes any straightforward reading of Stein’s evocations of race in the text, through oblique suggestions as well as brazenly appearing racial epithets. But even in the midst of intensely indeterminate uses of language, the inescapably shaping textual structures, notions, and infusions of race everywhere arise as that which profoundly grounds, enables, and most significantly troubles meaning-making and potentially coherent, connective readability and world-conception.203

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 203 Heidegger’s “The Age of the World Picture,” “On the Essence of Truth,” and “The Origin of the Work of Art” seem relevant here in terms of the ontological stakes and parameters of the creative challenging of

170

I. Opaque, Oblique, Oriental

From early on in Tender Buttons we find terms that throughout Stein’s lifetime and writing career marked certain groups as unassimilable to white American-ness. One might argue that Stein’s problematic political statements notwithstanding, appearances of such words as “Japanese,” “Chinese,” “Chinamen,” “red stranger,” and “niggers” in

Tender Buttons—in addition to the frequent appearance of “china”—(3, 7, 11, 44, 45, 49) are perhaps, in keeping with the spirit of the text, loosened from their conventional referential functions, that the destabilization of common definitional associations throughout the text applies to these words that would otherwise evoke reductive stereotypes. As many critics have done, one might instead claim that their appearance in the text is too trivial to merit consideration at all, or simply ignore their occurrence altogether. Alternatively, we might find that their notable appearance in the context of a project foregrounding resistance to traditional representation does at least invite further consideration of how they might work in the text in unexpected ways, and perhaps even constitute a key component in Stein’s anti-descriptive, differently- or non- representational project.

We might consider, for instance, the earliest reference in the text to a racially marked group in the sentence, “There can be breakages in Japanese” (“GLAZED

GLITTER” 3). As in other passages, the word “Japanese” is displaced from context that !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and encounter with the limits of representation in Stein’s writing here. Derrida’s Truth in Painting also seems relevant in this regard.

171 would give hints as to specific ways of reading the phrase. The “breakages” might refer to the fragility of popular “glazed” or “japanned” lacquer pieces,204 common objects of consumption during the cultural “Japan craze” among late nineteenth and early twentieth- century middle class American households (Yoshihara 10).205 As many historians and biographers have noted, various forms of Orientalism and “Japonisme” occurred later in the U.S. than in Europe, and continued through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including among the Steins, as seen in Leo Stein’s Japanese collections.206 The breakages in unspecified “Japanese” things might also bring to mind the breakdown of families common among Japanese and other Asians entering the U.S. during Stein’s lifetime.207 Alternatively, breakages reflect the common view in the West of Oriental cultures as diametrically opposed to universal human development, as deficient, incomplete, and contributing to Knowledge and Culture in only piecemeal and strictly

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 204 By the nineteenth century, lacquered objects were so frequently associated with Japan and Japanese methods of lacquering that “japanned” was commonly used to indicate any Japanese-like lacquering. (Honour 74–75). “Glazed” objects recall the popular Orientalist inclusion of Japanese art and objects in white American and European homes, which went hand in hand with national policies of exclusion, colonization (or attempted colonization), extraction of goods and resources, and the exploitation of various Asian peoples. 205 Josephine Park has noted that “breakages in Japanese” and the association of “culture” with “Japanese” can be specifically linked to not only the adoption of Asian tea-drinking practices in the West but also the vogue of “the cracked glaze of Japanese pottery,” tea-ware, for instance, that was “artfully fissured to evoke careless nature” (29). Park suggests that Stein’s textual “crockery” is evocative of the “warping or cracking effect” in the popular pottery of the era’s extended Japonisme. 206 See, for instance, Rydell (211), Wineapple (91), and Honour on Chinoiseries. The “grande explosion japonaise” hit Paris in the 1860s (Rydell 210–211), and became popular in the U.S. some years later (Wineapple 91). Leo Stein eagerly collected Japanese prints into the 1910s and had accompanied his cousin Fred on the popular Westerner’s trek through Asia, with leisurely stays in Japan (Wineapple 91–95). 207 Unlike Chinese laborers in the U.S., the Japanese were allowed to eventually bring their wives from Japan to join them in the States. But as poor immigrants in harsh working conditions, they most often experienced “breakages” in the family and a staggering in the arrival of its members to the U.S.

172 circumscribed ways with specific techniques and goods such as the making of porcelain or the cultivation of tea.208

However “neutral” or non-racialized a reading may be attributed to this passage

(and others mentioning “Japanese,” “china,” etc., in Tender Buttons), the very inclusion and use of these words, as well as the overall character of the text (if any generalization of it is possible) as thoroughly imbued with and celebratory of deviant sexuality, the domestic space, and the material textures of both language and embodiment, intrinsically evoke the space and determination of race (as in keeping with the articulation of racism and race in both the U.S. and Europe as primarily and obsessively involved with matters of sexuality and reproduction, family and home formation, and the place of women).

One might object to the confusion of the national and the racial here, but, as many of us are aware, from the nineteenth century on, “Chinese,” “Japanese,” and other national references were indiscriminately used as pejoratively loaded, race-marking terms primarily distinguishing non-American racial otherness rather than national-cultural specificity.209 The repeated appearance of “Japanese” shows one way in which the textually dynamic race-evoking elements of Tender Buttons are both particularly

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 208 Incomplete “breakages” could similarly be attributed to the Japanese themselves, as mere particularities, pieces of particularized embodiment seen as incapable of representing any form of unified, universal humanity. And, as suggested by David Lloyd, such breakage could evoke language and the common view during Stein’s time, notably among various modernists, of “Oriental” languages as unsophisticated, merely pictographic “systems of pointing.” 209 Anyone of Asian background knows experientially that this continues to be the case, not only in the U.S., but throughout Europe and the rest of the non-Asian world, where the U.S. still signifies whiteness and all Asians “look” “Chinese.” To this day, most English-speaking children know at least one common jingle or nursery rhyme in which the sing-songy chanting of the mere terms “Chinese, Japanese” is used as pejorative markers of “slanted eyes” and other “Oriental” features.

173 persistent in carrying materially embedded historical connotations and, in play with those ossified associations, also proliferate numerous undetermined chains of signification.

Whether “Japanese” above is read as referring goods, culture, people, or language perceived as foreign and “unassimilable,” it is highlighted early on in the text as somehow bearing significance among “OBJECTS” and marked by breakage. The textual ambiguity and significatory proliferation in play work on both semantic and syntactical levels.210 The use of “Japanese” later in Tender Buttons, in “culture is Japanese” (11) further asserts the popular Orientalist domestic culture that embraced the racial hierarchies of Western imperial consumption patterns. Both occurrences of “Japanese” stress the objectified positioning of the Japanese as essentially and primarily a trendy aspect of consumable culture, and as aesthetically engaging to westerners.211 Based partly on the elaborate exhibits mounted by Japan at numerous world expositions, the impressions of western travelers in Japan, the nation’s surprising success in the Russo-

Japanese War, its Euro-like imperial ambitions, and relative technological advancement, many Americans, while still seeing the Japanese as inferior “little brown men” in relation to white Europeans, also regarded Japan as the most advanced and culturally !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 210 It is notable that Stein does keep the term afloat, without any clarifying “the“ preceding “Japanese” (which would more clearly mark the word as noun) and also without any subsequent noun indicating an adjectival “Japanese.” 211 In the linking of “culture” and “Japanese” we can also sense a gesturing to the fact that many in the U.S. and Europe around the turn of the century showed particular appreciation for the Japanese as superior in culture and civilizational advancement among otherwise more notably backward Asians (Rydell 50, 55, 180–81; Sinkler). For relatively genteel Americans, especially those spared direct competition with the Japanese on the West Coast, things “Japanese” were often associated with an aesthetic charm that some considered absent among the “Chinese” and the rest of Asia’s more “primitive” cultures. (See Rydell, Wineapple, Dyer.) A taste for Japanese pottery and decorative domestic items must have continued well into the twentieth century in the U.S.; according to Mary McFeely in her study on American domestic conventions, the Japanese teacups and saucers that one typical American family had on display in their dining room briefly “went into exile” during the second World War (70).

174 sophisticated of the Asian continent.212 Stein had a typically racialized, colonizing education in Japonisme, particularly via Leo’s Stein’s interest in Japanese prints and culture, and through his accounts of Japan as a place “so novel and so picturesque.213

Thus, although the “Japanese” passages are multiply and indeterminately suggestive, the uses of “Japanese” and its inclusion at the very opening of Tender Buttons implies the importance of the Oriental as available for cultural-aesthetic use and consumption within a domestic and aesthetic context.

Alongside the “Japanese” elements in the text, the repeated occurrences of

“china,” “Chinese” and “Chinaman,” further contribute to the general air in the text of a white middle class domesticity that (although transgressive in some ways) embraced popular Orientalisms:

Plates and a dinner set of colored china. Pack together a string and enough with it to protect the centre, cause a considerable haste and gather more as it is cooling, collect more trembling and not any even trembling, cause a whole thing to be a church. . . ./ Cut cut in white, cut in white so lately. (“A PLATE” 7)

A little lingering lion and a Chinese chair, all the handsome cheese which is stone, all of it and a choice, a choice of a blotter. If it is difficult to do it one way there is

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 212 Stein’s contemporary, President Theodore Roosevelt, was another prominent American who, along with many others, repeatedly praised the Japanese for their cultural distinction, though he also considered them as part of the “Oriental” racial threat to the U.S. See Dyer 134–139. 213 Leo wrote to Gertrude on a trip to Japan with his cousin that: “everything is [curious] everything picturesque much is beautiful” (Wineapple 93). For Leo and others, “Japan was a country in miniature, an idealized playland both seductive and sedative” (Wineapple 93). Enjoying local pleasures explored by many male western visitors, Leo and his travel-fellows spent a month fulfilling their Japoniste fantasies in a rented house in a Japanese village: “They slept on futons, sat cross-legged on the floor in their kimonos, and ate from small stands. . . . They were not queasy. . . . about their cook’s procuring them Japanese ‘wives.’ . . . . Such was customary among visiting Western men, and these young men probably had heard of it even before their arrival and it probably seemed natural to them: their stereotype of Japan included a stereotype of Japanese women…..as libertine. Thus they could indulge themselves in ways unthinkable at home” (Wineapple 94). While Leo Stein was repulsed by conditions in Canton and Hong Kong he wrote, “when it comes to things that delight the eye and satisfy aesthetic sensibilities Japan is easily superior” (Wineapple 95).

175 no place of similar trouble. None. The whole arrangement is established. The end of which is that there is a suggestion, a suggestion that there can be a different whiteness to a wall. (“ROOMS” 44)

Alike and a snail, this means Chinamen, it does there is no doubt that to be right is more than perfect there is no doubt and glass is confusing it confuses the substance which was of a color. Then came the time for discrimination, it came then and it was never mentioned it was so triumphant, it showed the whole head than had a hole and should have a hole it showed the resemblance between silver. (“ROOMS” 45)

China is not down when there are plates. (“ROOMS” 49)

The ambiguous status of China and the Chinese is set up with their inclusion as both familiar household features and exotic curio, as both present and conveniently “not,” and as mere objects which continually evoke ornament and non-human otherness. The

“colored china” and “Chinese chair” are brought into a perhaps textually disconcerting but otherwise familiarly filled Euro- and Euro-American space (of “plates,” “dinner,”

“cheese,” etc.) only for limited uses, to provide a varying and exciting “cut in white.”

Again, some might argue that such a reading of “china” is an illegitimate imposition of race on the text, since everyday china is and was an ordinary aspect of the domestic scene. Its ordinariness notwithstanding, everyday “china” is not a historically sterilized, simply “race-free” element of a non-racially inflected domestic life—its use in the West being tied to the always already racialized economies of global modernity. The common appearance of “china” in Tender Buttons (and elsewhere in Stein’s corpus) and in Stein’s dining room does not make it any less a clear example of the thorough extent to which so many ordinary aspects of white domesticity were grounded in Western appropriations and manipulations of forms from other civilizations. Given Stein’s repeated use of the words “china,” “China,” and the more explicitly racializing (race-

176 evoking) “Chinaman,” it is unlikely that Stein meant to mute the most obvious signifying, graphic, and phonic resonances among these related terms and with their social context.

Especially within this particular period of newly increased contact, conflict, and (often forced and unequal) trade with nations in the east, the simple banality and ubiquity of

Asian-originated or Asian-inspired goods (including tea, spices, silk and others) as matter-of-fact elements of life in the West do not prove that they are isolated from race- related issues, but rather further demonstrate the extent to which so many details and aspects of ordinary life in the West were entirely dependent on normative hierarchical attitudes regarding race. The absolute taken-for-grantedness of Western possession and use of its racial others, and the view of such exploitation as a non-problematic, simply natural order of things, is indicative of the most characteristic, hierarchical race attitudes of the period.

The strictly circumscribed inclusion of things (and people) “Chinese” and

“Japanese” in Euro- and Euro-American spheres remain in keeping with Orientalist attitudes and a typical white domesticity which valued oriental goods as a source of distinctly foreign and primarily ornamental charm while otherwise assuming the exclusion (or limitedly pragmatic use) of Asian bodies in the modern domestic sphere and the nation as natural. Readers have often dismissed the appearance of such terms as

“chinaman” as simply reflective of common usage of the time. Though it is historically accurate to say that most white Americans in Stein’s time flippantly used the term

“chinamen” as a putatively neutral reference to men from China, without necessarily any overt racial hostility, in fact, the term was inextricably rooted in and continually linked to

177 virulently racist discourses of anti-Chinese exclusion in the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The seeming naturalness of such racially denigrating terms merely indicates the totalizing and ubiquitously normative acceptability throughout the white world of diminutively and reductively marking Asians as foreign and racially distinguishable from some white American and “human” norm.214 Though particularly opaque, the phrase “Alike and a snail, this means Chinamen” also manages to suggest that “Chinamen” are naturally separate and hermetically cut off (in their own distinctive home-of-origin toting bodies and “snail”-like shells), from Western settings, in addition to being primarily ornamental.215 Especially in light of its juxtaposition in the passage with “color” and “the time for discrimination,” these specific historical circumstances are inextricably embedded in the use of “Chinamen” above.216

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 214 While the commonness of the term among white Americans and Anglophones in the early twentieth century is clear, the assumption that the term is therefore devoid of any meaningful racializing content, and a possibly significant function in the text as such, is clearly misled. For Stein, the frequency of their occurrence in her work indicates not only her entrenchment in the racializing and racist views of her time, but also a distinctly preoccupied awareness of Asians as ever-present outsiders in her world, and of racial categories beyond the standard black and white American dyad. While some may have used the term without much strongly felt personal antagonism, no one living or growing up in late nineteenth-century or early twentieth-century California could ignore the linking of such terms to the notion of the Chinese as intrinsically, racially un-American. As numerous historical, sociological, scientific, and popular-press documents about and from the era indicate, all the official institutions of the science of man and also medical authorities shared in the belief of that Asians bore a distinctly un-American racial physiognomy.) Most Euro-Americans held the view that such putatively obvious, epidermal, cultural, and indelible racial differences made “Chinamen” inherently alien, irrevocably tied to a foreign land, and unassimilable to American life, and thus also naturally excludable and ineligible for citizenship, in contradistinction to all European groups. 215 They are, like “Chinese” chairs, just another ornamental feature of Rooms, and perhaps merely imitative in nature (“Alike”—as Orientals were considered unoriginal in terms of genuine invention and creativity), unlike the more aesthetically advanced West. 216 The repetition that “there is no doubt” about some condition or the meaning of “Chinamen” also seems to suggest that perhaps there is some doubt, since there is something “confusing” that “confuses the substance which was of a color.” It could be said that that is precisely what Asian immigrants to the western US did, confusing the clarity with which whiteness (as in non-black) “which was of a color” (perhaps yellowness) was distinguished from a Euro-white norm from—as courts struggled over how to define “white” and ensure that South Asians and other Asians did not infiltrate Euro-white privilege

178 We know that as a Northern Californian, growing up in Oakland and around San

Francisco, Stein’s first and principal impressions of racial otherness and foreignness were primarily shaped by the Chinese, the largest non-“white” population in the region.

Stein’s youth coincided with the racist anti-Chinese hysteria that defined and unified the state, both in the years leading up to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the decades following its passage, when riots, wholesale evictions of Chinese residents from Western towns, and constant public furor calling for stricter regulations (and for lifting of the time limit of ten years) kept the Chinese Question in the media and when Chinamen were a maligned but visibly familiar feature of everyday life.217 On the West Coast in particular, the ease with which Irish and Jewish Americans, Stein’s family included, enjoyed a greater degree of inclusion into whiteness earlier than in other parts of the country was largely a function of the hostile “discrimination” toward the more strikingly foreign

“yellow” and “brown” populations of the western states.218 Though the significance of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (ultimately needing to arbitrarily call on “common sense” notions and popular usage—which of course meant reference to ruling Euro-white standards.) Whether intentionally or not, next to “Chinamen,” the “time for discrimination” explicitly evokes the historical period involving the peak of anti-Chinese sentiment and violence in California prior to and for decades after the passing of the 1882 Exclusion Act (spanning Stein’s years of residence in California), which constituted a moment “so triumphant” for the widespread exclusionists and nativists. That the “whole head” or body, perhaps of the state, “should have a hole” seems to intimate the reliance of the national body and the state on exclusion, negation, and absorbed absence of that which is deemed undesirable 217 Headlines and articles from the region’s principal newspapers are filled with anti-Chinese, anti- immigrant, and anti-Coolie commentary as well as with reports of crimes purportedly committed by the Chinese residing in or attempting to enter the States, not only through the late 1870s and 80s, but well through the nineties and at the turn of the century as Californians vociferously called for permanent extension of the 1882 Exclusion Act. (Newspapers included the Daily Alta California, The Daily Bee, The Daily Examiner, The Morning Call, the Oakland Daily Evening Tribune, the Oakland Enquirer, and the San Francisco Chronicle.) 218 Not only was San Francisco’s Chinatown well-established by this time, but the Chinese also dominated the laundry business and the local selling of agricultural produce, and were commonly employed as domestic servants and cooks. Gertrude Stein’s mother, Amelia, noted in her journals household purchases

179 “color” (“A PLATE” 7) and “whiteness” (“ROOMS” 44) above are unclear, juxtaposed as they are so closely with the loaded terms “china” and “Chinese,” they evoke these historical racial resonances in addition to whatever sensory, aural, or cubist impressions they might convey. While the text is full of singular arrangements of words and novel use of language, and though it playfully evokes aspects of “a perfectly unprecedented arrangement between old ladies” (“IN BETWEEN” 14), the consistent association above of Chinese, Japanese, China, and Chinamen with ornamental and instrumental aspects of the domestic space aligns Stein, albeit indirectly, to the Orientalist spirit of her times and circles. Despite the relative unconventionality of Tender Buttons, the general landscape of contiguously related “OBJECTS,” “FOOD,” and “ROOMS” thus tends to establish a sense of a recognizably familiar Euro-American domestic space, within which context the very appearance of words as “Chinese” and “Japanese,” loaded with historical violence and heavy connotations of foreignness, stand out to connote distinctly foreign curiosity and charm.219

Curtis Marez’s work on Oscar Wilde is helpful here in unpacking the distinctly race-related significance of the apparent Orientalism in the space of Tender Buttons, with the Asian other as peripheral but necessary ornamentation in the Western imperial

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! that she made from the “Chinaman” [note]. And Alice Toklas mentioned Chinamen and her friend’s “Chinese cook” in her own memoirs (What is Remembered 13, 15). 219 The free-flowing but noticeable rhythm of these passages continues to call attention to the aural impact of the words as much as to any conceptual reference they might evoke. We might also note that the phrases “A little lingering lion and a Chinese chair” and “The whole arrangement is established” (ROOMS) in fact underscore their own “arrangement” in that they largely adhere to iambic meter. The line, “A little lingering lion and a Chinese chair, all the handsome cheese” is also noticeably alliterative and calls attention to its own playfulness with words and sound. And again Stein foregrounds the active tension between recognizable forms and attempted innovation in the text.

180 context, especially for those with questionable status as marginally white. Marez points out that “Wilde’s position as an Anglo-Irish colonial subject was, in various ways, a racialized one” and that “Wilde identified with the British Empire against his stigmatized

‘Irish’ status” (258). His public self-fashioning as a cultivated, European appreciator of

“Oriental” arts emphasized the civilizational and racial divide between East and West while downplaying distinctions made among Europeans. On both sides of the Atlantic,

Wilde helped to popularize and came to emblemize an aesthetic Orientalism that lasted into the early twentieth century. In his American lecture tour of 1882, and later in various popular magazines, Wilde endorsed the use of Oriental “curios” in the home and suggested that “non-European ornaments should inspire the fashion choices of wealthy women English women” (265).220

Whether they were aware of his opinions or not (and most likely they were), such attitudes were clearly shared by Stein and Toklas, who are shown in numerous biographical and autobiographical accounts to have delighted in Oriental clothing, accessories, and jewelry.221 Marez comments that Wilde’s attitude toward these objects

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 220 Wilde and others in the Aesthetic Movement did much to change English tastes in this regard. According to a 1895 commentator, “aesthetes” like Wilde stimulated. . . .consumer interest in “curios” and “knickknacks” from “India, China, Japan and elsewhere.” To the audiences he addressed during his 1882 American lecture tour, Wilde often recommended forms of non-European ornamentation (including supposed Eastern water jugs and embroidery, Japanese vases and mattings, Turkish hat racks, and rugs from China and Persia) as design models. Under Wilde’s editorship, Woman’s World published over thirty essays dealing with aspects of so-called exotic cultures and their ornaments. These articles, too numerous to name, include references to Eastern macramé and wallpaper designs; Persian, Egyptian and Indian appliqués; South African ostrich feathers for fans; South American perfume bottles; Egyptian and Indian shoes; Egyptian, Chinese and Japanese combs; Chinese screens; and Chinese, Egyptian, Turkish and Persian bridal costumes. All of these Woman’s World essays either explicitly or implicitly suggest that non-European ornaments should inspire the fashion choices of wealthy English women. (Marez 264–65) 221 See comments on “Oriental” and “Chinese” dress, jewelry, and gifts in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and What is Remembered.

181 celebrated but nevertheless ultimately characterized them as naturally inferior to the aesthetic achievement in European arts.222 The superiority of European fine art lay in the artists’ “perfecting of ‘Oriental’ aesthetics,” in the achievement of “the perfect harmony between Greek particularity and Asian abstraction” (265–66). Non-western art was still viewed as merely ornamental, formless until shaped and refined by Western artistry.223

In keeping with European constructions of the aesthetic (Kantian and Schillerian for instance), Wilde felt that “the spiritual properties of the cultured man must purify the raw material of sensation” (281).224 Wilde’s self-identification, both as a cultivated aesthete and as an imperially-ruling European, was thoroughly racial insofar as he laid claim to the transcendent position of the non-racial, self-determining and freely judging universal subject. “Wilde in effect sustained his identification with the British Union and

European culture by racializing ornamental otherness as a subsidiary adjunct to an

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 222 While attractive in its “frank rejection of imitation” and lack of attachment to the mimeticism of European art, Oriental art supposedly lacked the “purity of Classical restraint” characteristic of the Greek tradition and ultimately was considered as purportedly “monstrous in its too absolute distance from nature.” 223 Wilde also reserved the proper appreciation of the Oriental for those who could also rise “above” the marketplace, freed from common concerns of financial gain and labor and culturally developed enough for aesthetic critique. He commented upon what he considered a strikingly incongruous scene of Chinese laborers in San Francisco: I saw rough Chinese navies who did work that the ordinary Californian rightly might be disgusted with and refuse to do, sitting there drinking their tea out of tiny porcelain cups, which might be mistaken of the petals of the white rose. . . . If these men could use cups with that tenderness, your children will learn by the influence of beauty and example to act in like manner. (Quoted from Marez 280) For Wilde, the aesthetic sphere was “rightly” separated from the crude background of material demands and hard labor. As Marez notes, “his theory of the artist-critic’s transcendent aesthetic position presumed the coherence and autonomy of a distinctly British—and by extension European—artistic tradition,” and his “appropriation of non-Western ornament” was to “appear as an autonomous judgment of taste” (281). 224 In his “Race Under Representation” and other work, David Lloyd has explained the ways in which the construction of a universal aesthetic sensibility in the philosophies of Kant and Schiller in particular bear a racial structure in which racialized populations are characterized as aesthetically unformed, unformalized, and thus non-universal.

182 Aesthetic Empire” (Marez 258).225 In relegating exotic Oriental ornaments to the crude world of decorative crafts, and the Oriental to a position of non-universal, stagnant racial particularity, Marez notes, Wilde grounded his own identity in the strategically contrastive position of all civilized Europeans:

Wilde’s true men of culture thus rose above the market and the merely ornamental by appropriating and “improving” non-Western ornamentation. By actively furnishing his Empire with a catalogue of tasteful foreign objects—by helping to promote and institutionalize the taste for what he viewed as exotica—Wilde reformulated but substantially reconfirmed an imperial division of labor between Brit subjects and non-European objects.

In the imperial geography Wilde maps, then, the Irish can become citizens of the British Empire, and by extension, the legitimate heirs of European culture, only if others are treated as objects and hence excluded from imperial citizenship: Wilde can only appear British and European in contrast to people he regards as even less British and European than himself. Even as Wilde distinguished between himself and non-Western peoples, however, English and American observers dismantled this distinction, seeing him as just another Irish savage. (266)

Despite his elaborate self-construction as a superior Brit, the European and American press consistently denigrated Wilde, not only as a dandy, but specifically as a primitive

Irishman with simian features, or characterized as black or “Chinaman”-like. And though

Wilde attempted to publicly distance himself from the Dorian Grey-like image of the

Orientalized opium addict, he was unable to shed this association.226 Despite his efforts,

Wilde was “re-racialized” as “The Aesthetic Monkey,” a “Wild Man of Borneo,” an

“apeman,” and as a black dandy (Marez 266–67). He was also “lampooned in caricatures !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 225 As a promoter of Orientalist aestheticism, Wilde was thus importantly invested in the “hierarchical distinction between cultured subject and non-Western object,” (a distinction which his detractors nevertheless ignored) (Marez 258). His imperial Orientalism, Marez argues, was meant to solidify his own tenuous position within British imperial rankings. 226 Marez argues that “Dorian’s opium addiction becomes a foil for Wilde’s redemptive appropriation of non-Western cultures” (274) and that Wilde “demonizes Dorian’s drug addiction so as to sanction his own use (or abuse) of non-European ornament” (279).

183 which compared him to American Indians and the Chinese” (268). One American depiction cast him as grossly “Oriental”: “ . . . as a grotesque cartoon ‘Chinaman’ with a pigtail and ‘Fu Manchu’ moustache, flanked by purportedly oriental vases containing a sunflower and a lily” (272).227 Marez recounts that the sunflower had “rats for petals,” aligning an Orientalized Wilde with the “stereotypes of the Chinese as parasitic vermin threatening to overrun America” (272).

As was the case for other marginally, belatedly white Europeans and Euro-

Americans, Wilde’s avid Orientalism was animated, at least in part, by his own subjection to and desire to free himself from denigrating racializations. Globally stratified, racially hierarchized economies defined imperial identities on both sides of the

Atlantic. As a proper appreciator of colonial acquisitions, Wilde “believed that artists could unproblematically appropriate exotic objects so as to inject European culture with new aesthetic life”; he even “helped popularize the premise that non-European peoples had died so that Europeans might live—that they had sacrificed their lives so that their ornamental remains might redeem Western culture” (278). Wilde’s construction of his

“unified European identity” involved the fostering of “a taste for deracinated non-

Western goods” (278).228 Though not successful in his attempts, Wilde represented his

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 227 Wilde's use of opium did not help his image. In a period of heightened European colonization, between 1880 and 1914,227 and increased contact with non-European colonial subjects, opium use was associated with “racial contagion akin to miscegenation” and demonized as “quasi-racial transformation” and “degeneration” (Marez 274). The fear of “racial dissipation or contagion” also resulted from the increased, though still slight, “visible presence of the Chinese in the East End” of London (276). Not unlike Americans’ attitudes toward the putatively racially invasive Chinese at this time, English xenophobia was characterized by “the fear of blood-mixing in the individual English body and the fear of a foreign invasion of the national body” (275); opium bore the taint of the “yellow peril” on a global scale. 228 Serving as contrast, Dorian’s relatively egregious abuse of opium distinguished Wilde’s own use of Oriental “racial otherness” as proper exercise of European cultivation, rather than slavish addiction.

184 Orientalist tastes as a mark of freedom from racialized particularity, as “an autonomous assertion of will, the Empire’s self-coronation” (281).

Marez’s analysis of the racial dynamics in Wilde’s aesthetic Orientalism sheds further light on some of the shared Euro-American white, transatlantic imperial dimensions, as well as the aesthetic significance for Stein, of the intense racisms in

Stein’s time.229 It is plain that this period was thoroughly defined by the all- encompassing ontological grammar that Silva describes as modernity’s hallmark, in which the racial other naturally occupies the place of the exteriorly determined, acted- upon, unfree object of the white European “universal,” creative and self-creating subject.

The racialized body (not only in social and political terms, but in questions of the

Aesthetic) consistently emerges as that which stands for the outside of a history of human development and Civilization, and as always inadequate to potentially transcendental and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 229 Though differently inflected, recognizably similar white supremacist racisms were shared across white western nations, such that it was never questioned among them that their imperial practices were unethical or illegitimate. French empire-building during Stein’s lifetime was no less ambitious than that of the British, and imperial attitudes of white-European racial superiority characterized the French both at home and abroad. Though some in the expatriate community may have felt that France was free from the seemingly archaic racial prejudices that troubled the U.S, many non-European residents would find that French racism was merely differently articulated. (As seen in Claude McKay’s biographical impressions Banjo, the rampant exoticism of French arts and popular entertainment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the experiences of the victims of French colonial aggression and assimilation programs.) With colonies already well-established in Northern and Western Africa, the expansion of the French Empire in Indochina at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries meant an increasing South Asian population in France expanded the French population’s experience of the non- European foreigner as racially other. France was in its heyday of colonial power in the 1920s and 30s, and (at least) the entire first half of the twentieth century involved the building of French individual and national identity around its globally-reaching racial domination. The numerous, extravagant World Expositions held by France, the U.S., and Britain throughout this period were patriotic tributes to their scientific, technological, civilizational, and overall racial superiority over their colonial acquisitions. (Wineapple notes that Stein attended at least two of these international expositions, one Grand Exposition as a child when her family was in Paris (17), and another during a 1900 trip to Paris as a young adult with Leo (133).) And the shared attitude of superiority over non-Western nations “of color” was consistently evident, for instance, in the general consensus among these nations that countries like Japan should not be deemed racially equal, as was indicated by the rejection of Japan’s request for such recognition at the end of WWI. (See W.E.B. Du Bois on Asia 5, 37.)

185 universal subjecthood, as that which is left behind and (purportedly) does not have access to capacities to create the truly and most sophisticatedly and intelligently beautiful Art.

The non-white racial body was implicitly indicative of the primarily physical, fleshly miring of folks in the body in alignment with the unfree object—incapable of thoughtful and creatively free acts, always falling short of the (putatively) most masterful wedding of formal intelligence and constructive material. It is unclear whether Stein was aware of the workings of such a grammar, but it is evident that she did put it to use.

Stein occupied a racial position that, like Wilde’s, was on the margins of whiteness and that benefited from accentuations of the racial contrast represented in the more “visible” difference of the (putatively) more distinctly non-white races. As is well known, anti-Semitism was common both in Europe and the States at this time. The absence of much public discussion by Stein of her Jewishness (which I do not believe amount to disavowal) and her general acceptance as on the white side of the most significant color lines do not necessarily imply that she was not attuned to her own ethno- racial marginality, or that she did not have to navigate her way in society and in the literary/artistic world in light of her known Jewishness. When considering their grand tour of the States in 1934, for instance, after the success of The Autobiography, Toklas was “fearful of the homophobia they might face,” but Stein was reportedly “more concerned about possible anti-Semitism” (Daniel 160-61). Like Leo, Alice, and others in her circles throughout her life, Stein constantly “put up with casual anti-Semitism even from friends” (Daniel 82), and was understandably cautious. Overall, Stein seems to have freely identified with her Jewish heritage and community while also (for the most

186 part and often strategically) aligning herself with whiteness over and against black, yellow, brown, and red racial others.

Notwithstanding her (oft-cited) problematic political associations and alignments, especially during World War II,230 I would agree with Brenda Wineapple’s assessment that though Stein was not religious, she considered herself as “firmly Jewish” (56) and never denied or tried to hide her Jewishness, except in the extreme instance of needing to remain undetected by Nazi Germans.231 Both Leo and Gertrude Stein took it for granted that they were Jewish and thus had a given affinity with the Jewish community, which at different times played greater or lesser roles in their social lives, but which was never intentionally downplayed or disavowed. As children, even in California, the Steins were made to feel their own Jewish distinction by their peers (Wineapple 37), and almost all of

Stein’s close friends during the socially-blossoming years on the East Coast, both in

Baltimore and Boston, were Jewish (Wineapple 46-57).232 The Steins also attended

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 230 As Stein scholars and perhaps many Modernism specialists are aware, Barbara Will’s work (especially her book Unlikely Collaboration and her earlier article “Lost in Translation”) has most extensively commented on the damning collaborationist ties Stein had with the Vichy government, especially through her friendship with Bernard Fay. In her Two Lives, Janet Malcolm has commented more briefly on these associations. Though I will not focus on these issues here, I do not mean to dismiss or excuse Stein’s politics, but see them as a part of an overall conflicted and unsystematic problematic in her generally conservative, unstudied, and racializing views. I also find it difficult and problematic to judge in retrospect the wartime decisions of one belonging to a persecuted minority and pressured by fears regarding basic survival. 231 While Wineapple’s characterization of Stein here contradicts many other critical accounts of Stein and may surprise some readers, I would argue that close attention to details in Stein’s writing throughout her career are largely consistent with this account, much more so than with conclusions that Stein essentially rejected her Jewish background. Close readers of Stein know that she repeatedly referred to Alice Toklas throughout her writings as her little “Jew” and made many other indirect references to Judaism. 232 Stein would acknowledge that at Harvard, “to be a Jew is the least burden on the individual of any spot on earth,” but also that Jews were a distinct minority and “frequently unwelcome” (Wineapple 56). Of her fellow residents at the typical girls’ boardinghouse for Radcliffe students, Stein concluded that “everybody was New England there” (Wineapple 55), implying her own foreign status. Stein had found that both her seemingly wilder Californian background and her Jewishness set her apart among the mostly non-Jewish

187 Hebrew school and were associated with the local First Hebrew Congregation and the

Hebrew Society while living in Oakland (Wineapple 17, 21). Though neither took the practice of religious observances seriously, Gertrude and Leo embraced their Jewish circles where such friendships (if coinciding with other common interests and attitudes) easily presented themselves, and both publicly voiced their contempt for fellow Jews who would “identify themselves entirely with the Christians” and reject “their own people”

(56).233 Stein also jokingly but half-seriously referred to herself as sharing the distinctions of her “tribe,” for instance in her self-acknowledged propensity for talking at length.234

In one of her college compositions, which remained consistent with her attitudes later in life (as Malcolm’s Two Lives helps to demonstrate), Stein set out to explain that

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! students, and she seemed to accept this condition matter of factly, though clearly taking offense when her Jewishness was thrown in her face as a limitation or defect. Stein had one Radcliffe friend who admitted to having “never known a Jew” before she had become “liberated in regard to racial questions.” And when Gertrude commented once that she had managed to get to “the top of the heap” (probably in her studies or general accomplishments), her friend relativized and racialized her achievement by replying “The top of your heap.” Stein was “much offended” (Wineapple 56). 233 Leo Stein even wrote an article for The Jewish Comment, which covered life in the Jewish community of Baltimore (in which Gertrude and Leo were active), criticizing the bourgeois Jews “who had turned their back on what amounted to their origins, retreating behind a complacent, assimilated gentility.” He claimed that though these more Americanized and affluent Jews tried to distance themselves from the more recently arrived poorer Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, they “were but a ghetto ‘with a shirt on.’” And “Gertrude agreed” (Wineapple 132). 234 This association is mentioned at least once in the words of the Stein-based character of Adele in Q.E.D., and seems consistent with later comments she made in conversation. Carl Van Vechten, for instance, would say in 1914 that Stein claimed that Lincoln, whom she admired, had a “Jewish strain” in his parentage that would “explain many things in his career” (57). She clearly agreed with many of the notions of “positive,” as it were, stereotypes of Jews. In later works, such as Everybody’s Autobiography and other lectures, she would comment on how the Jewish “Oriental” strain in her own character, and in Picasso’s “Spaniard” character as well, contributed to their creative genius. As an enthusiastic, lifelong patriot, Stein identified herself nationally as thoroughly American, but her Jewishness also fundamentally shaped her view of her own racial identity as ambiguous (“What Are Masterpieces,” Everybody’s Autobiography) and contributed significantly to her work, her notions of creative genius, and her assumptions about social and marital affiliations.

188 the “modern Jew” (as in non-religious) could and should publicly assimilate but also nevertheless always maintain a sense of Jewish identity, a difficult-to-define-but- enduring “strong race-feeling” and a sense of an ineffable “family tie” with “kinsfolk.”

She argues that such a feeling nevertheless is not political and “does not in any sense clash with the loyalty of a man to his nation” (“Modern Jew”235), but does involve a racial or “kinsfolk” integrity of the sort that would preclude intermarriage with non-Jews,

“for intermarriage would be the deathblow of the race.” Stein took it for granted that her own life partner would also be Jewish-American (Alice is often referred to as her “little

Jew”); she commented that Jews were naturally drawn to other Jews in friendship and for all serious matters of need, and even that Jewish children should be adopted into Jewish families.236 While largely assimilated into non-Jewish circles later in life, Stein specifically spoke out against the sort of assimilation that amounted to total familial or

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 235 Here I refer to the text of Stein’s Radcliffe theme: “The Modern Jew Who Has Given Up the Faith of His Fathers Can Reasonably and Consistently Believe in Isolation,” printed in its entirety in the article of the same name by Amy Feinstein. (PMLA, 116:2 (Mar., 2001), pp. 416-428.) 236 Janet Malcolm’s account of Stein’s recommendations that Jewish children be adopted by Jewish families shows the persistence of these beliefs through her later years. In her biographical Two Lives, on how Stein and Toklas survived the second World War as two Jewish women in France, Janet Malcolm recounts an incidence in which Stein became aware of a friend’s desire to adopt a five-year-old Jewish orphan boy. Stein “was consulted and she said no you can’t do that, he must be adopted by a Jewish family” (Malcolm 185). Malcolm notes that while some concluded that Stein’s advice was cruel given the persecution and deportation of Jews in France at the time, further research has shown that the incident and Stein’s remarks took place near the end of the War when there was no question of putting the child’s life at risk. Though not explicitly recounted through her own writings, (and what, if anything, is directly recounted in her work), Stein was apparently adamant about this position, which she perhaps most clearly articulated in her 1896 Radcliffe essay, “The Modern Jew Who Has Given Up the Faith of His Fathers Can Reasonably and Consistently Believe in Isolation,” on the naturalness of enduring kinship ties among Jews even when traditional religious beliefs and practices were abandoned. The impassioned strength of Stein’s convictions in this regard are revealing of her sense of the importance of innately racial or at least historically familial kinship ties among Jews. (See Malcolm 186-190).

189 social absorption in the private realm, claiming that “of all forms of assimilation, intermarriage was the most pernicious” (Wineapple 57).237

Thus, rather than distancing herself from her Jewishness, Stein seemed to compensate for her marginality with her genuine, enthusiastic patriotism, and she also benefited from the particular racial advantages of the presence and highlighting of more exotically and distinctly other “colored” folks on the scene. As she herself put it, she simply “never made any bones about [being Jewish]” (quoted Daniel 82). Rather, she assumed and embraced a Euro-American whiteness that naturally included European

Jewish immigrants, much as Wilde promoted a broad European culture that included its

Irish colonized in white civilizational superiority. Stein’s and Alice’s well known

Orientalisms functioned in ways not unlike Wilde’s strategic racial self-positioning in the

British imperial context. Despite various racially-complicating factors, Stein and Toklas, like Wilde and many others, did enjoy the benefits of a national/imperial whiteness constructed in contrast to colored others.238 And if Stein and Toklas did not have an

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 237 Wineapple notes: Jews might attend Christian schools or have Christian friends, said Stein, but they had to draw the line at mixed marriages. She was adamant. And it was a position she long maintained. . . . For she always considered herself—indeed, characterized herself—as Jew. And she never repudiated her sense of the Jew as ethical standard-bearer. In college, she explained this as originating with an “inborn. . . ethical and a spiritual nature ever fostered and increased among themselves [Jews],” making them “a Chosen People chosen for high purposes. . . . Later she would associate both genius and depression with Jews. . . . she argued that Jews were intellectually superior, clannish, charitable, and capable of amassing great wealth. Moreover, these characteristics were innate; Jews were basically better, smarter, kinder. . . . she simply assumed persecution was inevitable. “ (Wineapple 57-58). Her insistence on the necessity of national loyalties overriding all other identifications did not preclude a sense of enduring spiritual or ethical affinities uniting Jews in an ineffable familial sense, by a “bond of love and duty” existing even “between perfect strangers. . . . of the one race” (quoted in Feinstein 426). Stein goes so far as to say that “A Jew admitted into the society of Gentiles is admitted on sufferance only” (Feinstein 428). 238 As mentioned, (during their childhood years in the States), the Asian presence in California allowed immigrant Jews speedy access to whiteness and mainstream political power. While the Stein and Toklas families were no doubt made aware of their Jewish distinction, their daily lives were for the most part unencumbered by the stronger and more blatant anti-Semitism in the Eastern states.

190 excess of funds for very extravagant living, they were still comfortable enough to enjoy the typical Oriental luxuries of many ladies of their time, in the dressing and presentation of their living space as well as their own persons.239 Objects of oriental décor, Japanese prints, and Chinese paintings were familiar to them. And they both had a penchant for

Oriental-inspired flairs in dress and jewelry, as well as Asian servants.240

Readings of Stein and considerations of Marez’s explanation of the cultural and imperial uses of the “Orient,” its materials, artifacts, and bodies, shed light on the multiple ways in which the Oriental served the West and white racial identity. Josephine

Park has read the consumerist appropriation of Asian goods and cultural forms (such as

Japanese pottery and tea ceremonies) in logical opposition to the exclusion and dehumanizing of Asians reflected in the explosive passage from Four Saints in Three

Acts: “If it were possible to kill five thousand chinamen by pressing a button would it be done. / Saint Therese not interested” (Quoted from Park 33). Park’s insightful readings of Stein’s Orientalisms in the texts she considers constitute a significant contribution to the consideration of Orientalism and race in Stein’s writing. Rather than concluding

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 239 It is perhaps significant that on Stein’s part, the capacity to write and collect art was made possible by her being the beneficiary of an income originating from her father’s Californian business and property investments, much of which was enabled and facilitated by his not being a person of color. 240 Such decorative details are seen in various writings and photos of the Steins’ residence. And in addition to being familiar with Leo’s collection of Japanese prints, Stein had also become well acquainted with Chinese paintings during her Radcliffe years. As a friend of Thomas Whittemore, she had been asked to help unpack and classify a “great collection of Chinese paintings” that had arrived “in Boston at the Museum” (Toklas 50). The experience was “a pleasure that remained vivid in her memory.” And Toklas, also a product of the San Francisco area, was also familiar enough with Orientalia to be able identify when “a beautiful Chinese porcelain” was a proper “museum piece” (Toklas 80). Stein also mentions in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas that she was struck by Toklas’s distinct Chinese style of dress during their early meetings, and Toklas mentions having once refrained from giving Gertrude a pretty piece of jewelry because it would seem “insignificant compared to her lapus lazuli Chinese mandarin chain. (What is Remembered 44).

191 however, that the various stances on the Orient in “Susie Asado,” Tender Buttons, and

Four Saints necessarily represent “opposing ends of Stein’s habits of mind” (41), indicating a “fundamental division in [Stein’s] imagination,” I would argue that both

Stein’s culturally appropriative tendencies toward the Orient seen in Tender Buttons (and

“Susie Asado” and elsewhere) and the exclusionary, ethically dismissive stances exhibited in Four Saints remain consistent with a racial logic that views the Oriental and

Oriental artifacts as outside of the space of the human, as existing for white enjoyment and consumption, as essentially grammatically aligned with the object, and as always bearing a racial trace that marks them as subhuman. The use and appropriation of

“Oriental” goods, ware, and cultural practices, as well as the exploitation of cheap, subservient Asian domestic servants (discussed further in the following chapter), are consistent with a generally exclusive and racially hierarchical stance in the West that strictly circumscribed the role and place of the Oriental as ontologically subjugated to the human.

In her various self-proclaimed pronouncements of literary genius, it is clear that

Stein aspired to artistic greatness and “genius” in a “universal” (Euro-American) sense and context, in comparison with other British and American writers; and especially early in her career, her status as such depended partly on her self-distinction from the Oriental and “primitive” African or Afro-American arts and cultures at her disposal as a Euro-

American writer.241 Not unlike Wilde, the building of Stein’s desired authority as a

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 241 In Everybody’s Autobiography and other later writings and lectures, Stein makes subtle and tentative identifications with the “Orient” as a Jew, and seems to attribute some sense of artistic originality or genius to the source, as she did for Picasso as a Spaniard with some of the “Orient” in him (“Picasso”). But that is

192 creative genius would benefit from the strategic contrast of her own universally representative position (especially on a European and American stage) from the necessarily, matter of factly (for her), inferior and racially defined non-European. Stein seems to have shared Wilde’s embracing of a natural “imperial division of labor” between European subjects and “non-European objects” (Marez 266). (I will address elsewhere the further implications of Orientalisms manifest in Stein and Toklas’s employment of several “Indo-Chinese” servants over the years.)242 As a writer, she consistently aligned herself with the Anglo-, Euro-American literary tradition and with the self-determining peoples of Europe, who though perhaps bearing limited influence from the Orient or Africa,243 were collectively (along with their fellow Jewish

Europeans), distinguishable from those more clearly marked as racially other, and for whom the autonomous appreciation and creation of genuine art was naturally reserved.

All this is not meant to reduce Tender Buttons to a simply Orientalist artifact or to restrict readings of the rich text to race-related critique. I mean to argue that while the overall spirit of the text is clearly playful and indeterminate, it is nevertheless steeped in a !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! not to say that she saw such slightly orientalized or perhaps partially Orient-influenced sources as congruous with full Asian, South Asian, or Middle Eastern Oriental-being. The contrary is suggested in her textual treatments of and apparent attitudes toward her “Hindoo Chinese” servants in the later writings. And her general identification with and desire for recognition in Anglo- and American literary spheres is apparent throughout her writing, lectures, correspondences and reported conversations over the years, as well as in her purposeful gifts to certain prominent writers of newly published books of hers. 242 Stein mentions in Everybody’s Autobiography that she and Toklas preferred these Asian servants and that Indo-Chinese domestics were easily procurable in France. Though she shows affectionate (and patronizing) appreciation for them, Stein also characterized her “Indo-Chinaman” as a curious, markedly foreign, somewhat infantilized and immature, and, for the most part, pleasant and amusing addition to the household. 243 Stein repeatedly noted this “mixed,” slightly but significantly Orientally influenced heritage as especially conducive to artistic genius—as in Picasso’s “Spaniard” background, and her own “Jewish” and thus “Oriental” background in Stein’s view. (See “What Are Masterpieces And Why Are There So Few of Them?”, “Picasso,” and Everybody’s Autobiography.

193 certain troubling Euro-American, white-feminine middle-class flavor (with all its early twentieth-century implications) and obliquely but noticeably and even unavoidably concerned with race. As a reader, I find the text distinctly enjoyable, innovative in its rhythms, delightful in its celebration of everyday domesticity, affections, and pleasures, impressive in its handling of words in unexpected yet richly suggestive combinations and contexts. And yet—also laden with unsettling racial dynamics. Even apart from the more incisive irruptions of the racial, all the scattered references to “coffee,” “spoons,”

“butter,” “cream,” “salad,” “oat-meal,” “roast potatoes,” a “piano,” “cheese,” “custard,”

“curtains,” “lace,” “chairs,” “a clergyman,” and “table linen,” for instance, cumulatively contribute to an always already racially inflected context, a European-Americanized domestic background that frames such statements as, “What is more likely than a roast, nothing really. . . .” (“BREAKFAST” 27).

Notwithstanding the relatively transgressive backdrop of a text characterized by

“singular arrangement” (“BOX” 7) that seems to act as if “there is no use in a centre”

(“ROOMS” 43) and often does disturb various norms, the contrastive and contextually dissonant resonances of “Japanese,” “Chinese,” “Chinamen” and even fine “china” appear as radically othered elements of internal differentiation, which, even as they are

“let in” (“NOTHING ELEGANT” 6) retain their curiosity and gesture toward that which is perceived as naturally from outside one’s known and at least (somewhat) racially centered world. These internal contrasts in Tender Buttons, suggesting enduringly significant and incommensurate incongruities within western domesticity, are constantly in play with the formal textual incongruities of Tender Buttons and challenge the notion

194 of simple national, cultural, and sexual identity while also relying on notions of natural opposition and racial difference.

II. Who’s/Whose Dinner: (All-)Consuming Otherness

“If the truth must be known, all affectations and pretense aside, the dinner, the world over, is the symbol of a people’s civilization. A coarse and meanly cooked and raggedly served dinner. . . . expresses the thoughts and perhaps the spiritual perception of a nation or family. A well-cooked and prettily served dinner will indicate the refinement and taste of a nation or family.” Food in the United States, 1820s–1890 244

The seemingly random or purportedly insignificant evocations of race in Tender

Buttons and elsewhere in Stein’s writings are clearly of a piece with Stein’s innovative word- and language-plays and the abundance of contextual and extra-textual details announcing Stein’s racial preoccupations. And as I have discussed, this is plain throughout the text even before we approach the perhaps most notorious race passage in

Tender Buttons. Reading the text closely, we find that this passage, oft-cited and also often summarily dismissed, does not occur as an isolated, anomalous, or exceptionally contradictory moment in Tender Buttons, as many critics have claimed. The passage in question is of course the “DINNER” entry containing the infamous “needless are niggers” statement (36). Rather than examining this passage closely and in context, or considering it in light of the entire text’s racialized undertones, many critics have tended

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 244 In Susan Williams (2006 156) quoting English Home Life (Robert Laird Collier, Boston: Tickener & Co., 1885, 71).

195 to simply condemn or ignore this moment in the text. Further attention to the passage, however, shows it contributes significantly to the notable mise en relief and compositional implications of the racial in the entire text. Through vaguely but markedly connective repetitions and resonances of words (including the word “butter”), sounds, and varyingly suggestive associations with numerous other passages, we find that

“DINNER” works together with other entries and moments throughout Tender Buttons that both explicitly and obliquely illuminate race as a non-discursive but real, textually- framing, poetics-shaping, pervasive air—an atmosphere-saturating element that profoundly informs Tender Buttons (and that seems to point to a hyper-awareness of the racial climate of her world on Stein’s part).

Considering such varied associations and exploring the historical weight of the words here does not mean we are attempting to logically decode or decipher one decisive referential meaning in the text. That said, as with much of Stein’s writing, this oft-cited but seldom interpreted passage is weighted with rich sediments of suggestion. In

“DINNER” we read:

Egg ear nuts, look a bout. Shoulder. Let it strange, sold in bell next herds. It was a time when in the acres in late there was a wheel that shot a burst of land and needless are niggers and a sample sample set of old eaten butterflies with spoons, all of it to be are fled and measure make it, make it, yet all the one in that we see where shall not it set with a left and more so, yes there add when the longer not it shall the best in the way when all be with when shall not for there with see and chest how for another excellent and excellent and easy easy excellent and easy express e c, all to be nice all to be no so. All to be no so no so. All to be not a white old chat churner. Not to be any example of an edible apple in. (“DINNER” 36)

With its mention of “acres” and “land,” and “white” and “nigger,” the “DINNER” passage does not introduce but rather dynamically echoes repeated intimations of a

196 historically raced and divided American landscape. 245 The most striking resonances of the passage are with the prevalent notions that Afro-Americans were both not needed or wanted by the nation (especially insofar as other cheap, racialized labor was widely available) and also that they were physically “needless” in that they putatively required

“less” to be content and maintain their standards of living. The fact that the notorious

“needless” line is specifically juxtaposed with images of isolated body parts reminiscent of slave auctions further reinforces the notion of the black body as object emptied of sentience and thus logically “needless,” as manifest in the slaves’ apparent cheerfulness and their apparent reducibility to the soundness of their parts at the auction block, the site par excellence that figured the ontological commensurability between the black body and the non-sentient commodity-object.246

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 245 In addition to the general, pervasive ordinary racism across the U.S. and (albeit differently manifest) other Western imperial nations, the juxtaposition of “Dinner” and “needless are niggers” would also have resonated with the hate and controversy stirred by the relatively recent, nationally publicized and scandal- evoking event imprinted in national memory. In 1901, when Stein was still a medical student in Baltimore, then President Theodore Roosevelt caused a national uproar when he invited Afro-American leader Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House. White supremacists, especially Southerners but also across the States and around Washington D.C., responded with fury throughout the press, despite the fact that Washington was a favorite of the white public in his calls for the Afro-American community to embrace traditionally subservient vocations. Senator Benjamin Tillman from South Carolina openly expressed the widespread, murderous rage among indignant whites: “The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that n----r will necessitate our killing a thousand n----rs in the South before they will learn their place again.”245 The vehemence with which the country insisted on the fact that Afro-Americans were decidedly “needless” and unwanted at the white “dinner” table (except as servant), especially in the iconic American home par excellence, constituted an event in itself and instated the “dinner” in question as the most egregious racial and social faux-pas of the era. Intimations of this event in the text seem to suggest a limit to the acceptable forms of social transgression in otherwise alternative, non-normative domestic arrangements, perhaps even suggesting a subtle acknowledgement of such racial limits despite other challenges in the text to norms regarding sexuality 246 Saidiya Hartman discusses in length the fact that slaves were forced to “step lively” and do their best to appear gay and healthy in all their parts as they were inspected by potential buyers at market. As Hartman explains in her thoughtful study, the characterization of “Negro nature as carefree, infantile, hedonistic, and indifferent to suffering” was integral to the racist constructions of black subjectivity and their essential reduction to objects “for white enjoyment” (22, 23). The nearly boundless “burst of land” is suggestive of both the “discovery” of North America by the Europeans and even more, the later surge of increased access, brought about by the development of the transcontinental railroads, the “wheel” that “shot” open

197 Just as the aforementioned passage mentioning “Chinamen” takes a pointedly historically narrative turn with “Then came the time for discrimination,” there are intimations of the historical immediately surrounding the passage in question, indicated by the phrasing, “It was a time when. . . .” Though it is as obscured and reference- evasive as the rest of the text, this passage also bears a significant suggestiveness of the racial paradigms of the period. Not only throughout the passage itself, and its immediate context, which I will discuss below, but also in relation to the overall context of Tender

Buttons, the passage is inexorably imbued with racially loaded significance. In its overtly objectifying terms, within the context of a text that celebrates, or at least emphasizes the construction of, an arguably white feminine domestic space (inflected by textual and sexual subversiveness), the chain of words “needless are niggers” emphatically contrasts the pervasive stereotype of blacks as largely insensible and brute-like with the emergent body and enclosed domestic space of the white woman. In contradistinction to the

“ladies” (Tender Buttons 14) who have set up a notably fine and cozy, whimsical but still recognizably proper (albeit in some ways “unprecedented” or “singular”) little household,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! this land explosion. Alongside the image of a vast land being measured and divided up piecemeal into private “acres,” we can also infer loose images of chattel slavery and the slave auction, of those “sold in bell next herds,” and the inspection of Afro-American bodies as they are reduced to the status of property and appraised according to the usefulness of their objectified bodies: “ear nuts, look a bout,” “shoulder,” “chest,” and “measure.” The adjacent breakdown of “easy” and “excellent” into “e c” reinforces the imagery of dismemberment (of not just words but also dehumanized bodies) as the formal and abstractly signifying word gives way to the raw material of the graphic mark or individual phoneme. The juxtaposition of all these images reminiscent of slavery, objectified and fragmented black bodies, and land ownership (of “acres”) recalls the nation’s failed promise of “forty acres and a mule,” and intimates the extent to which race and property have been intertwined in the States. The “acres” and violent racializing of bodies also again suggests the objectification of Native Americans as mere material obstacles to the “acres” of undeveloped land. In western areas especially, they were persistently seen as threatening, savage animals who, if not swiftly domesticated should be exterminated. As David Lloyd has also pointed out, “acre” can also be read as an anagram of “race.” And “butter” and all its intertextual, racial associations are again evocatively involved in the mix—contained in “butterflies” and suggested in the mention of “churner.”

198 Afro-Americans are evoked in the text as the always already outside of the mere

“needless” body, as putatively other to and naturally unappreciative of all the finer food, objects, and carefully decorated rooms constructed in Tender Buttons.247 Given the predominant social and textual context, the passage in “DINNER” (36) (regardless of what other nuanced and indeterminate inflections it might also have) inevitably resonates on a primary level with automatic presumptions of blacks as less than human, as properly relegated to the grammatical category of that which is consumed at dinner, and as

“needless” bodies naturally made for the role of preparing and serving “dinner.”

The “DINNER” passage and the offensively ringing “needless are niggers,” are also meaningfully situated by an immediate textual context that merits attention. Leading up to “DINNER,” a distinctly American scene is suggested in the Whitman-(and thus expansion-)evoking and “dialect” echoing “Leaves in grass and mow potatoes.”248 The

“DINING” (36) passage, which immediately follows the loaded “DINNER” entry, further underlines this conquest-defined Americanism. The simple claim that “Dining is west”

(in “DINING” implies that the cultivated, distinctly formalized practice of “dining” (as

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 247 As Saidiya Hartman has discussed, in Scenes of Subjection, among the most powerfully enduring stereotypes of Afro-Americans in the early twentieth century was the notion that they were characterized by an especially “constricted humanity,” a particular “suitedness for slavery” that purportedly manifested itself everywhere by the “demonstrated slave contentment” prior to “emancipation,” and the apparent lack of sentience that enabled blacks after Reconstruction to carry on lackadaisically even under intolerable and abased conditions (Hartman 6). 248 Thanks to David Lloyd for pointing out the dialect-imitating “mo’ potatoes” here. Stein often associated herself with Whitman as one of the few all-time great American writers, and she repeats “leaves of” and “leaves in” several times in various pieces. The Whitman suggestion here is especially significant in that he was not only a quintessentially American literary icon but also an enthusiastic Euro-American expansionist. The placement of the indirect allusion to him in the entry “WAY LAY VEGETABLE” implicitly invokes American conquest and its imperial, conflict-ridden expansion across the continent. The expansionist scene implied in “leaves in grass” is also hinted at in “mow potatoes,” which alludes vaguely to the pieced and plotted, agricultural cultivation of the land, the absence of which among Native American inhabitants was read as good reason for U.S. American appropriation.

199 opposed to merely (animal) “EATING”—the title of the two subsequent entries), in which basic animal sustenance, general consumption, and singular culinary/gustatory pleasure merge with culturally and socially significant form, belongs to the West.249 As noted in the epigraph above, Victorian and turn-of-the-century Europeans and Euro- imitating Americans valued dinner in particular as the meal and daily ritual which crucially integrated the satisfaction of needs and pleasures with distinctly civilized and human form.

Though, like the rest of Tender Buttons, it is not decisively interpretable, the segment immediately preceding “DINNER” also seems to strongly suggest American territorial, propriety issues as the phrase “red and relet” gives way to an image of racial expansion with “rest in in white widening” (“CUCUMBER” 36). An ongoing social

“problem” in the relatively newly adopted, frontier-like areas, which still encountered violent conflict with “hostile” Native American tribes, in Stein’s U.S. was the presence of the unassimilated “red,” who (problematically) had no sense of individual proprietary relation to land.250 Dispossession of Native lands was justified in part by the characterization of Native Americans as inadequately “individual,” so that a paternalistic takeover and redistributive “relet[ting]” of land, overseen by the U.S. government, was deemed necessary. Indirectly, allusion to this issue suggests the notion of non-white racial particularity as inherently in conflict with universalist (both totalizing and !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 249 In the U.S. in particular, this would imply a legitimization of the nation’s movement “west,” in part because of Euro-Americans’ civilized approach to “dining,” an indication of exceptional self-determining mastery over the appetites and part of their claim to racial superiority as an exceptionally “free” people. 250 In his Individuality Incorporated, Joel Pfister details the way in which U.S. policy toward Native Americans involved an aggressively assimilative strategy that involved complete appropriation and redistribution of lands, and indoctrination of communally oriented peoples in individualist capitalist values.

200 individualizing) representation in the ontological as well as liberal-democratic socio- political sense outlined by Silva, which also seems to be at play in Stein’s deconstruction

(of sorts) of representation on the level of language. Finally, there is also a sense in this entry that anxious (white) American frontiersmen and pioneer families can “rest in” the assurance of complete U.S. expansion, the “white widening” over the continent, in control and total land possession.

Reinforcing the vaguely but noticeably intimated elements of these passages, the

“COOKING” entry following “WAY LAY VEGETABLE” (34) also significantly shapes the context leading up to “DINNER”: “Alas, alas the pull alas the bell alas the coach in china, alas the little put in leaf alas the wedding butter meat, alas the receptacle, alas the back shape of mussle, mussle and soda” (34). The repetition of “Alas, alas” overtly evokes the Stein-Toklas relationship suggested everywhere in the text. The Orientalist penchants in the household also come across in “alas the coach in china” and “pull alas the bell,” invoking perhaps a ringing for their often racially identified servants, and even evoking French-occupied Indochina with “coach in china”—in which we can’t help but hear “Cochin-china”251—and thus specifically Indochinese servants (who were probably not employed in the Stein-Toklas household around 1913, but who were becoming more numerous and visible in France after the establishment of French Indochina in the late !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 251 The freely associative reading of these passages may seem to overreach in interpretation, but Stein’s entire corpus and compositional practices (filled with wordplay; puns; jokes; homonym-based associations; word-splitting, -combining, and -embedding; multiple aural and rhythmic resonances; exploitations of multiple ambiguities and double-meanings galore…) both invite and require this sort of readerly interaction with the text. Cochinchina was a major regional component of the territory that comprised French Indochina, presently the southern-most portion of Vietnam. It was the first point of entrance for French naval forces in the region in the 1850s and 60s. French colonialists not only used references to “Indochina” but also to the specific regions of Cochinchina and Annam (for instance) when speaking of life in or goods from these colonies.

201 nineteenth century).252 The re-appearance of “butter” here then further contributes to the recurrent racial-reproductive connotations, especially in the loaded joining of words in

“alas the wedding butter meat.” In this particular context, it intimates the formal/culinary/racial “wedding” functions mentioned earlier, raising the notion and characterization of butter as that which best “marries” and “amalgamates” (Cookbook) distinct flavors, and as that which is thus (loosely and diversely) evocative of race, sexuality, and racial mixing. In addition to the official “wedding” function, butter connotes the simple fleshiness of “meat” and the sensual/sexual pleasures of Stein’s life with Alice (“Alas”). Beyond evoking the butter-color ties to questions of racial authenticity and passing between white and black in the U.S., juxtaposed with “china” and the sounds of “Cochin-china” in this particular passage, butter also evokes the

“yellow” races, the yellow peril, the association of Asian bodies with both domestic service and exotic sexual fantasies.253

This passage is further juxtaposed with intimations of the consumable Asian body as the tertium quid, the ultimate undefinable emblem of foreignness in the predominantly

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 252 Stein had visited the 1900 Paris Exposition with her brother Leo during one of their European tours (Wineapple 133), and the Indochinese pavilion and live exhibits was the most prominent of the colonial exhibits at this particular Exposition . The Government General of Indochina spent over 1.5 million francs on its exhibits at the Exposition, which involved over 100 “natives” and covered “nearly one-fourth of the space reserved for the colonial sections” (Hale 75). Thus even before more intimate contact with Indochinese servants in her own home, Stein would have certainly been familiar with common French depictions of the Indochinese; in comparison to other colonials and even other Asians (such as the Chinese), the Indochinese were depicted as particularly docile and domestically skilled and purportedly superiorly suited for servant work in comparison to other colonized peoples (Hale 68, 75). 253 We see in “VEGETABLE” for instance, another obliquely muted but distinctly “out there” convergence of sexuality and the Oriental body, of the female cut, the Orient’s crescent, and the Oriental’s slanted eyes: “What is cut. What is cut. What is cut by it in./ It was a cress a crescent a cross and an unequal scream, it was upslanting, it was radiant and reasonable with little ins and red./ News. News capable of glees, cut in shoes, belike nder pump of wide chalk, all this combing.”

202 black and white figuration of U.S. racial conflict—possibly the “peculiar third” in

“CHICKEN”: “Alas a dirty word, alas a dirty third alas a dirty third, alas a dirty bird”

(35).254 This collage of loose and rich textual plays shows a convergence of the issues of color, butter, mixing (and the intertwining of racialization and sexualization), and Asian and Afro-American bodies in particular around the “DINNER” passage. Even the subsequent “CHAIN-BOATS” (35) that are “merry” and that “blew, blew west, carpet,” also interestingly evoke both transoceanic colonial extraction of goods from the East

(including famously luxurious Oriental textiles and “carpets”) and the slave-ships loaded with shackled African bodies and heading westward in the Middle Passage. In the

“CHAIN-BOATS” we also hear the allusion to unwelcome “chinks” (chains, chain-link-

! chink) arriving in “boats.” Distinctly racialized yellow and black bodies are repeatedly evoked and placed in and around “DINNER,” as bodies and parts to be consumed, enjoyed as a sort of “FOOD” for white pleasure. It is within this richly suggestive immediate context that “DINNER” occurs, one far from void of racially charged elements.

In reading through this entire section of “FOOD,” we find Stein’s poetics of obliquity and her celebration of transgressive sexuality (all her playful, experimental cuts and beats, jabs, flutters, and coos) merging with a repeated, at times violent racialization of bodies. The way in which the intensely charged racial moment in “needless are niggers” enlivens the whole text, in a sense, by recharging both previous and upcoming moments of sexualizing, racializing, uncontrollably proliferating associations and !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 254 “Chicken” is of course not only a stereotypical image for the female body in general, the “bird,” but also part of the racist stereotyping of Afro-Americans as chicken thieves and consumers of chicken.

2 03 suggestions is striking. For the sake of limited space, if we consider, for instance, the

(partial) consecutive series of entries in “FOOD”—“ASPARAGUS” (“Asparagus in a lean in a lean to hot. This makes art and it is wet wet weather wet weather wet.”),

“BUTTER,” “END OF SUMMER,” “SAUSAGES,” “CELERY,” “VEAL,”

“VEGETABLE,” “WAY LAY VEGETABLE,” “COOKING,” “CHICKEN,”

“CHICKEN,” “CHICKEN,” “CHICKEN,” “CHAIN-BOATS,” “PASTRY,” “CREAM,”

“CUCUMBER,” “DINNER,” “DINING,” “EATING,” “SALAD,” “SAUCE,”

“SALMON,” “ORANGE,” “ORANGE,” “ORANGES,” “ORANGE IN,” and “SALAD

DRESSING AND AN ARTICHOKE” (33–38)—we find a curious constellation of obliquely echoing clusters of variously related words, sounds, and images coloring and calling back and forth to each other and also insistently, interactively sounding race. It is only after reading through and considering “DINNER,” for instance, that I heard the

“Cochin-china” allusion in “COOKING,” and only after remarking the mixing of “Alas,”

Orient, and “butter” there that I noticed “a crescent a cross” and “upslanting” (over and against upstanding perhaps, in addition to slanting eyes and feminized bodies), the opposition of Orient to Occident (earlier in the text than I had noticed before) in

“VEGETABLE” (34) which resonates with the text’s more explicit reference to “Europe and Asia” in “ROOMS” (52).

Given the richly race-laden context of the entire text, the evocation of black bodies in “DINNER” also further resonates with the later line from the final section,

“ROOMS,” “Explaining darkening and expecting relating is all of a piece,” which occurs

204 just before the passage suggesting that “there can be a different whiteness to a wall.”255

Throughout the nineteenth- and early twentieth- centuries, unspoken and taboo explanations for the growth of a “darkening” mixed race population, with many possessing a problematic and “different whiteness” would involve the “explaining” away of illicit “relating.” Such intimations are further underscored later in “ROOMS” when the quality of darkness is explicitly related to commonly racialized physiognomy in the segment: “. . . . supposing the question arises is hair curly, is it dark and dusty, supposing that question arises. . . .” (We might note here that in addition to skin color, and often even in precedence over skin color at times, which was viewed as potentially deceptive or unreadable, hair texture, its relative curliness or “kinky” quality was considered a telling marker of racial blackness.256 And further, all forms of butter and other oils were used to help tame and untangle “African” hair, to get it to resemble typically less curly “white” or

“good” hair.257)

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 255 We might also read the “darkening” here as related to racial dynamics in the vogue of Africanist influence in the work of Stein’s artist friends literary contemporaries around the time of the writing of Tender Buttons. In such terms, the expected “relating” might suggest “darkening” influences in the Europeans’ work through the “relating” of artists globally in terms of influence, colonizing, and appropriating relations. The introduction of a certain “darkness” that would evoke “explaining” might also go beyond allusions to the world of painting Stein was familiar with and suggest the pervasive anxieties regarding racial “darkening” in the U.S. 256 As Ayana Byrd and Lori Tharps have discussed in Hair Story, from the eighteenth century on, white Euro-Americans insistently denigrated not only non-white features and skin color, but also the quality of African hair as “kinky” and “wooly,” animal-like and non-human (14). Many whites went so far as to claim that blacks did not have “real hair” but essentially some other substance closer to animal “wool” (14). By the nineteenth century, after extensive mixing with between blacks and whites, hair texture was even “considered the most telling feature of Negro status, more than the color of skin” at times, since many considered technically “colored” had skin “as light as many Whites” (17–18). Byrd and Tharps also write that “the quest for straight hair was often a torturous obsession for slaves” (17), that slaves went to great, often painful and toxic lengths to straighten their hair, using everything from “bacon grease and butter,” “bacon fat,” “goose grease,” and even extremely caustic lye to “straighten the curls” though it would “eat the skin right off a person’s head” (17). 257 Interestingly, one of the common terms used for inferior quality butter was “wool grease.”

205 The significant questioning and evaluating historically surrounding these physical features (especially in the U.S.), supplementing the inspection of body parts in

“DINNER,” again recalls the national hysteria against reproductive “darkening” influences and the troubling “different whiteness” which might render skin color an inadequate marker of race. To those most interested in the protection of a certain exclusive whiteness (“as property”258) and the reproductive increase of a purely European

“blood”-based white race, undetectable infiltrations of seemingly pure but innately

“different whiteness” constituted a most nefarious threat. The “DINNER” passage, in conjunction with related passages throughout the text, thus draws attention to the contradictory and unstable processes of racialization while also further reflecting the preoccupation with race and sexuality throughout Tender Buttons.

Following “DINNER,” we find yet another passage with which it retroactively resonates, a passage that (especially with “DINNER” and all the “FOOD” passages mentioned above and the rest of the text) nearly explicitly evokes Native Americans as part of this racially charged context:

Please pale hot, please cover rose, please acre in the red stranger, please butter all the beef-steak with regular feel faces. (“SALAD DRESSING AND AN ARTICHOKE” 38)

In light of Stein’s evocation in other texts of “red” Indians and repeated allusion to the counting song, “One little, two little, three little Indians…” in various pieces, the very mention of the phrase “red stranger” here is evocative of the Native American and the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 258 See Cheryl Harris on “Whiteness As Property.”

206 American “Indian problem,” and it reinforces the earlier reading of “red” in this sense.259

The use of “acre” here thus raises the inextricably linked questions of race and land- appropriation, and explicitly echoes the earlier “acres” (mentioned above in “DINNER”).

The “red stranger” passage also further illuminates the strategically differential racial policies in American history. In the early twentieth century, unlike other groups considered non-white by the ruling white majority in the States, Native Americans came to be viewed as somewhat assimilable and racially proximate enough not only to be culturally re-educated, but also to “amalgamate” racially by intermarrying with Euro-

Americans.260 By the late nineteenth century, after containment through mass extermination, such mixing between whites and the racially-marked “red” population was !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 259 The racial significance of this usage of “red,” and the predominant figuration of the race problem in the U.S. in terms of color (“red,” “black,” “yellow” against “white”), is further suggested in the fact that in Stein’s day the color red was explicitly evoked in most references to indigenous Native Americans. Euro- Americans frequently referred to Native Americans not merely as “Indians” or “Injuns” who happened to be superficially “red” but specifically as “s.” This is seen in numerous popular texts, films, records of conversations (for instance, mentioned by Alice Toklas in her memoirs) and popular entertainment from the era, and mentioned specifically by Stein in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in a passing mention of “native songs of the red indians” (771) and in Everybody’s Autobiography where she discusses a football game as reminding her of the dances of “Red Indians.” “Red Indians” were featured in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows, and the early film White Fawn’s Devotion (1910) for instance, was subtitled: “A Play Acted by a Tribe of Red Indians in America.” 260 As noted elsewhere, well into the twentieth century, racial mixing, “amalgamation,” or “miscegenation” among blacks and whites was militantly condemned and legislated against. Amalgamation used in this sense by anti-“miscegenation,” pro-segregation whites was not necessarily used to emphasize any distinct preservation of ethno-racial difference, but to designate “acceptable” and “compatible” biological- reproductive mixing and enfolding into the white population through marriage and cultural assimilation. Asiatic residents in the States were seen as both unwilling and constitutionally unable to effectively mix with white Americans. Part of the charm of things (including bodies) “Japanese” and “Chinese” was their enduring “Oriental” foreignness. And, as blacks in the US were expected to know “their place” as crucially separate, “chinamen” and all “Asiatics” were expected to observe an indelible border between China and the West. The Joint Special Committee from the Senate on Chinese Immigration would report: “They do not amalgamate, and all conditions are opposed to any assimilation.” It was also claimed that they were an “indigestible mass in the community. . . . inferior in mental and moral qualities” and “an undesirable element in a republic” (US Senate Report). The Chinese, and “Asiatics” in general, were seen as Others par excellence, with a lack of “sufficient brain capacity” for “self-government” and with “no conception of representative and free institutions (US Senate Report). Afro-Americans were granted limited access into the public sphere, but intimate relations between whites and members of either the “black” and “yellow” races were punishable by both legal and mob violence.

207 accepted and even encouraged, for the expedient absorption of the remaining Native

American community.261 The call to “acre in the red stranger” is thus evocative of both biological and ideological engulfment in the aggressive Americanization policies with regard to the “red man,” including the specific attempt to inculcate the liberal democratic values of individual rights, a Protestant work ethic, ownership of private property, and acquisitive American consumerism.262 While white-black and white-yellow sexual relations were considered anathema and were thought to pose a continual threat of invasive racial degeneration, white-red mixing was uniquely viewed as contributing positively to the strategic assimilation of the “red” race.

These historical details regarding the peculiar racial status of Native Americans, as clearly “colored” others who could nevertheless acceptably intermarry with whites, lend further significance to, and are in turn further accentuated by, the appearance of butter in this passage, “SALAD DRESSING.” As discussed above, the early statement that “[t]he difference is spreading” frames and joins the repeated appearances of butter in the text while amplifying their multiple race-related connotations, as related to contagion and difference, the uniting of different individuals or elements, and the possible proliferation of unfamiliar or hybrid creative work, partly through the very mixing and spreading of different racial influences. The fact that “please butter all the beef-steak with regular feel faces” follows “Please pale,” “please cover,” and “please acre in the red stranger” shows another striking instance of “butter” being brought into play with race !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 261 By the late nineteenth century, Native Americans were considered “a vanishing race” (Fredrickson 250). 262 As is well known, the US government aggressively pursued the Americanization of Native Americans from the 1880s through the 1930s, separating children from their families and reinventing them in boarding schools promoting total assimilation. (Goldberg 83. See also Pfister.)

208 matters and especially the issue of acceptable race “amalgamation.” Here we recall that

Toklas praised butter as that which “marries” distinct flavors, but only those flavors that can be properly amalgamated. Whereas the juxtaposition of butter (via “butterflies”) with black bodies in the “DINNER” passage might stress the questions of authenticity linked to “passing” or “fraudulent” butter substitutes, “butter” here might alternatively emphasize the special racial case of Native Americans as those who were seen as racially amalgable, able to be enfolded, as it were, into the white nation.263 The merely animal

“beef-steak” (“red” flesh) is to be covered over by creamy “pale” “butter” as “regular” and putatively raceless, converted into formally universalized, “and conventionally readable, humanized, and individualized American “faces.”

These intimations of the “red” presence in the U.S. and the government’s particular approach to the “Indian Problem” above thus suggest an additional way in which a sense of the resistance of the racial to formal representation in general infuses

Tender Buttons. We find in “SALAD DRESSING” that just as “niggers” in “DINNER” were figured in fragmented physicality, the “red stranger” is associated with animal fleshiness, as raw material that must be transcended and properly molded into universal individuality, but which will nevertheless remain marked by a residue of innate “red”- ness that is merely superficially “cover[ed]” over. Native Americans by the turn of the century were perceived as both “colored” and “amalgable” into American whiteness.

Though they were targeted for absorption into the American racial body, such integration !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 263 As a distinctly diminished and diminishing population, Native Americans were a case apart from the racial others viewed as ominously “spreading.” Here, on top of its technical properties with regard to facilitating mixing, the ambiguously “pale” coloring of butter is distinctly evoked in the transformation of the “red stranger.”

209 into the national body required a near complete erasure of the primitive racial trace attributed to “red” bodies in the U.S.264 Significantly, those involved in making proper

American citizens of the Native American population spoke in terms not of a mere education or re-education, but of an excess racial trace attributed to the Indian’s body, an

“Indian nature” that was “bound in red” (Pfister 66), and that need be excised, thoroughly

“killed” for the Native American to assume a constructed “human nature” (66).

Though the Indian schools were founded on the assumption that any “red”

“indigenous racial specificities” had to be destroyed for Native Americans’ possible participation in any civilized “human” community (Hutchinson 83), attitudes toward the native population were contradictory and also exhibited the typical exoticist stances toward non-white, “primitive” peoples. By 1900, widespread cultural nostalgia for lost

“innocence” and “authentic” native life, untainted by modernity, engendered a vogue for

“Indian” artifacts in the States.265 Popular consumer and cultural aesthetic interest in

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 264 The policies of the Indian conversion boarding schools established in the late nineteenth century in the U.S. worked on the principal assumption that for Native Americans to assimilate into U.S. life, one had to “kill the Indian” in order to “save the man” (quoted in Hutchinson 8). Numerous proponents of “Indian” racial and social absorption, including Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the famous Carlisle school, spoke of the Native American as yet unformed flesh. Pfister notes specific comments by Pratt in this regard: “The Indian,” Pratt insisted in 1904, is “raw material in the forest, mountains and plain to be brought and put through the proper refining influences of our civilization mills of today, and wrought into shape and then sent to work on the great ocean of our industry and thrift.”. . . . In 1892 Pratt published in Carlisle’s Indian Helper a letter from an executive of a large Bessemer steel mill who voiced approval of Carlisle because its smelting of “Indians” was so similar to the transformation of “red ore” into commodifiable steel. . . . John Bakeless, director of Carlisle’s education department, imagined students as raw material moving through the school on an assembly line: “bringing the crude Indian in at one end and sending him out the other, a man and a woman and a citizen.” (Pfister 40-41) 265 According to Elizabeth Hutchinson, though collection of these artifacts had been popular since the beginning of westward expansion and the days of Lewis and Clark, at the end of the nineteenth century in particular, a homegrown “Indian Craze” exploded across the U.S., on the heels of the widespread “Japan craze” (18–25). While Indian schools shifted from an all-out “kill the Indian” stance to a slightly more primitivism-inflected assimilationist policy, equally racist attitudes governed both trends. While Native American youth were expected to disavow and excise every un-American, racially or culturally particularizing trait (including use of their tribal mother tongue), they were also seen as always retaining a

210 Indian culture also involved a fascination with the exotic, scantily clad “red” bodies that produced the baskets, mats, and other decorative material. Beyond being displayed in

Wild West shows, with the development of photography and eventually cinema

(Hutchinson 58), images of “copper-brown” dark-skinned Native Americans in

“primitive” tribal attire were prevalent in American popular culture (Hutchinson 155).

The relegation of the “Red Indian” body to subhuman racial otherness was consistent throughout these decades and never strayed from the racially hierarchical ontology of

Euro-American thought. Even when pushing for transformation through assimilative re- education, Americans generally assumed that only a very limited extent of intellectual or cultural development was attainable by the re-educated.266 Native Americans themselves remained closely associated with the objecthood of their handicraft; as Hutchinson notes, the “exhibition of a [Native] craftsperson alongside objects for sale was particularly common” (43).

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! trace of “Indian” authenticity for white American enjoyment. By the turn of the century, Indian schools added courses in “traditional handicrafts” to their vocational curriculum (Hutchinson 8), and Native American youth were encouraged to maintain certain (particularly marketable) ties to their culture. Elizabeth Hutchinson notes that many up-to-date middle class homes were outfitted with “cozy corners,” which had begun as corners in the home reserved for the display of primarily Oriental, Middle Eastern, and eventually Japanese-themed objects. And as “marketing of Native American art exploded at the end of the nineteenth century” (Hutchinson 20), the “Indian corner” and the domestic exhibition of Indian artifacts became common.

266 The ongoing view of the native population as not-quite-human (especially prior to any reproductive racial mixing), as essentially brutish and expendable bodies was carried over into the boarding school era and was generally reflected in the emphasis on vocational education in the Indian schools (See Hutchinson, Pfister. Artistically oriented or especially intellectually advanced material was deemed inappropriate and unnecessary, and children were taught to focus on tasks such as sewing, farming, and other craft-work (See Hutchinson 63). It was considered laughable, for instance, to expect “an Injun to read Darwin” or other intellectual or scientific material (Hutchinson 190). The contradictory call for Indians to both transcend and maintain racial particularity existed both in and outside the Indian schools. Graduates of the Indian Schools could rarely find work outside reservations; they continually came up against the “entrenched racism of American society” regardless of outer signs of assimilation (Hutchinson 58).

211 The “spreading” of raced butter imagery throughout the text reaches beyond the

“red stranger” passage in Tender Buttons as well. We’ve noted butter’s inclusion in

“COOKING,” and in the “needless are niggers” entry (where it is embedded in the “set of old eaten butterflies”). Additionally resonating with these butter passages are several lines from “BREAKFAST”:

A sudden slice changes the whole plate, it does so suddenly. . . . An imitation, more imitation, imitation succeed imitations. . . . Suspect a single buttered flower, suspect it certainly, suspect it and then glide, does that not alter a counting. . . . An ordinary color, a color is that strange mixture which makes, which does make, which does not make a ripe juice. . . . An excuse is not dreariness, a single plate is not butter, a single weight is not excitement, a solitary crumbling is not only martial./ A mixed protection, very mixed with the same actual intentional unstrangeness and riding, a single action caused necessarily is not more a sign than a minister. (26–28)

As the passage celebrates sudden change, “mixture,” imitation, and butter, it questions the “single” and the “solitary” as lacking “excitement.” It also repeatedly associates butter with that which is multiple or mixed while suggesting that it is incongruous with the solitary or “single.” A “single buttered flower” is suspicious, for instance, and “a single plate is not butter.”267 The final instruction in “BREAKFAST,” “Spread it all and arrange the white place” might imply that “butter”/”spread” is somehow evocative of the mixing or spreading of some element of difference within or on a space of whiteness, a possibly racially distinguished space, a dining plate, or the blank page before and during the composition process. What brings “excitement” to the otherwise dreary “white

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 267 The “glide” in “suspect it and then glide” here interestingly evokes the unstable and constant “glissement” Lacan attributes to all signifying processes. In this context, the “glide” that follows “suspect[ing[“ is possibly suggestive of the idea that an ever-present, initial desire for and suspicious gaze toward authenticity or the indisputable “real” of meaning or the object, or of ontological/racial identity, necessary cedes to [merely provisionally structured] indeterminate movement.

212 place” or the empty “plate” is the improvisational “cut” (in Moten’s terms) or “sudden slice”; and “color” is the composite “strange mixture,” the creative element “which makes, which does make,” which generates meaning and textual material.

As one might expect, given its ubiquity throughout the text, butter also has its own entry in “FOOD.” The entry seems somewhat opaque, and yet it is quite provocative:

“BUTTER”

Boom in boom in, butter. Leave a grain and show it, show it. I spy./ It is a need it is a need that a flower a state flower. It is a need that a state rubber. It is a need that a state rubber is sweet and sight and a swelled stretch. It is a need. It is a need that state rubber./ Wood a supply. Clean little keep a strange, estrange on it./ Make a little white, no and not with pit, pit on in within. (33)

While at first glance the passage above may seem rather nonsensical, it is full of striking, though peculiarly and inconclusively presented, suggestiveness. The sequence

“BUTTER/ Boom in boom in, butter,” along with evoking some sort of explosive growth, stresses the material alliterative impact of “butter” and “boom” and loosely reflects the fact that butter’s essence is in its very materiality. It incites a seemingly universal appreciation that is thoroughly bodily and sensorial and also historically racially circumscribed and particular to the West and to European cuisines and palates (at least the form of butter Stein was familiar with and loved). In “show it” and “I spy,” following the more aurally emphatic “Boom in boom in butter,” we might read a suggestion of the abstracting move from the concrete toward the visual in the historical-cultural significance of the color of butter and its related evocation of purportedly ontologically

213 signifying capacities of visually manifest (yet at times impossible to detect) aspects of racial difference.

The subsequent middle section in this passage goes on to link such processes of signification to images of reproduction and the State. The racial resonances here seem as explicit as any obliquely representational (or some might say non-representational) writing can get. The coupling of “butter” and “flower” in “BUTTER” echoes a line in the “BREAKFAST” entry above, “Suspect a single buttered flower.” Playing on the image of the emblematic “state flower,” and complementing the image of a

(re)productive “boom,” the repeated linking of butter and flower (in addition to reinforcing the broad associations among butter, sexuality, and reproduction) suggests not only the notion that the nation-state must “flower,” but also that positive growth is defined by processes of proper reproduction inevitably linked to race.268 It is precisely in the context of anxiety-loaded racial boundaries where all things related to “butter”

(authenticity, trueness of color, etc.) and “flower[ing]” (sexuality, reproduction, progress) call for “suspect[ing]” and regulating on various fronts. We might also note that the

“flower” is not only the part of a plant that houses its reproductive parts, but precisely that which also tends to be the most visually distinct and identificatory aspect of or sign for the plant, a sort of equivalent for the human face.

As David Theo Goldberg and Saidiya Hartman, among others, have demonstrated, the modern State, and the United States in particular, has defined itself through selective inclusion and strategic policing of reproduction as race-production. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 268 That reproduction matters have always been significant to the State and its policing of racial categories has been discussed in depth by Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, and others.

214 Repeatedly, state representatives of the white majority have called for reproductive growth among members of the putatively superior [Euro-white] race while discouraging and restricting reproduction among the “inferior” races. The juxtaposition of “flower” and “rubber” here colorfully evokes these contrastive pressures from the state upon different racial populations. The prophylactic- (and racially-subjugated-colony-) evoking

“rubber,” along with “sweet and sight and a swelled stretch,” raise notions of the strategic blocking of reproduction (among colored races)269 immediately alongside lines suggesting the state’s “need” for reproductive “flower[ing]” among whites. Such striking juxtaposition of all these terms, especially in the evocative “state flower,” overwhelmingly resonates with the suggestions of reproductive race matters elsewhere in

Stein’s writing. The apparent “need” “that a state flower,” and “that a state rubber” is most suggestively meaningful in light of the racial dynamic of the period. The late- nineteenth-century “boom” in the commercial production of “rubber” condoms and the ever-increasing extraction of rubber by western powers from their colonies, means

“rubber” (sometimes called “India rubber”—during the heyday of French Indochina, rubber was also a particularly profitable resource270) would inevitably contribute to connotations of sexual intimacy, imperial racial anxieties, the policing of racial

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 269 The “swelled stretch” here being suggestive not only of the sexual act itself but also the (potentially “favorable” or distinctly “unfavorable”) swelling of the pregnant female’s body, which obsessed those concerned with racial identity and purity. 270 Brocheux and Hémery mention in their Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858-1954, that in contrast to various less successful attempts at plantation cultivation of crops such as coffee and tea in the “agro-industrial plantation sector” of colonial economic exploitation (125), rubber “stood out as [the plantation sector’s] greatest success” (126). As a happenstance (or uncanny?) link to Stein’s own French- American ties, we might also note that in the later years of the colonial setup, the U.S. “absorbed an increasing amount o the rubber output” (Brocheux 177).

215 reproduction, the threat of disease, and the desire for containment of such sexually

“spreading” disease as well as the spreading of undesirable races.

In the passages above and elsewhere in Stein’s writing, the repeated juxtaposition of “flower” and “butter” (in both “BREAKFAST” and “BUTTER” above for instance) illustrates another crucially suggestive constellation-forming association between richly charged and mutually enlivening words in Stein’s corpus. Adding distinctly to the weight, connotation, and texture of each word, the “flour” evoked in the rapprochement of “flower” and “butter”271 repeatedly reinforces the sense of the sensual and all the culinary and bodily pleasures intimated by “butter” in Stein’s multiple uses of “flower” and of specific kinds of flowers throughout her writing. In her characteristic wordplay, which we also see elsewhere in the form of homonyms, Stein again manages to call into play endless webs of potential meanings that dynamically charge this text while also retroactively recalling and resonating with all the secretly explicit, explicitly hidden, or openly provocative plays on the ineffable intertwinedness of text, body, pleasure, reading, writing, reproduction, flavor, taste, history, and race. We see the significance of this kind of textual work in Stein’s infamous and ubiquitous use of the word “rose” as well, which in addition to being directly juxtaposed with butter in numerous cases

(several of which I have already mentioned), is also indirectly intimated in each use of

“flour” and “flower.” Stein’s “rose” not only raises the loaded associations carried by

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 271 This specific reading is made more explicit elsewhere. In “American Food and American Houses” (1935), Stein writes that food “always remains the same” and “has to be made of flour and butter and eggs and water…” (HWW 83). In “An Acquaintance with Description, we also find: “There can be flower too flour too flower too there can be corn flour too when there is this and more” (563). Other provocative ties between “butter” and “flower” and “rose” will be discussed in the following chapter.

216 these words, but in turn disseminates its historically and symbolically loaded meaning- fullness (which I will discuss further in the following chapter) in the generous scattering of these words throughout Stein’s writing.

If such loaded associations are surprising, unlikely, or arguably unintentional, they nevertheless demonstrably emerge from Stein’s text and are far from anomalous. In each individual instance of “butter” in the aforementioned passages, the immediate context richly elicits readings linking butter, race, sexuality, and reproduction. (The various passages together also mutually support and affirm such readings.) In addition to the passages above, yet another use of “butter” in “FOOD” also provocatively echoes all the other instances of “butter” in Tender Buttons and specifically resonates with the

“BUTTER” entry:

“SAUSAGES.” Sausages in between a glass. There is read butter. A loaf of it is managed. (33)

Here butter is tied to the clearly phallic image of “sausages.” Sausages are evocative not only of the male reproductive organ, but also, in that they are by definition meat products wrapped in casing, the prophylactic “rubber” sheaths that help to ensure that reproduction is properly “managed.”272 The use of the word here with “butter,” which apparently has special significance that must be “read,” thus again evokes both sex and the official overseeing of reproduction (as under a “glass”), both singular reproductive acts (eg. of pleasures in bed or in culinary (re)creation) and the formally iterative “making of

Americans” or universal citizens through accepted reproductive relations. We might say !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 272 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “sausage” in the early twentieth-century was even used to refer to rubber, or “India rubber.”

217 that this passage directly invites readers to thoughtfully and unrestrainedly “read butter” in Stein’s texts in all manner of ways.273

One might wonder whether Stein is still deliberately pushing against the limits of naming and against conventional associations in the particularly offensive race-related passages in the text, whether she might be exploring parodic or ironic uses of conventionally racist terms while also critiquing the regulation of reproduction. On the one hand, it seems problematic to simply dismiss the charm and innovations of Tender

Buttons based on the scandal of certain deleterious expressions in the text, especially since the writer may possibly be indirectly critiquing other voices in American history.

The passages linking butter, race, and reproductive matters may even seem to suggest a possible critique of the State’s maintenance of racialized systems through the policing of sexual relations and reproduction. However, while the text itself may reflect such critical strains, it might also be that Stein considered the particularly offensive race words as mere plastic linguistic material, and raced bodies as a colorful resource for the [white] avant-garde writer, as available as any other material for innovative compositional, and potentially ironic use for white enjoyment. That Stein might have viewed words such as

“chinamen” and “niggers” as more malleable textual material, perhaps for ironic uses, is possible, but no less problematic.

Sonia Saldívar-Hull’s indictment of Stein as too racist to even be read as part of a feminist literary tradition might seem extreme, but other critics’ tendencies to ignore the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 273 The construction “read butter” might be read as insisting on the central textual-connective role, the rich associative and suggestive density, and the importance of actively, dynamically, productively reading “butter” as meaning-charged and productive in this text and throughout Stein’s corpus.

218 irruptions of race (and possible racist resonances or complicity with a white racist tradition) in Stein’s more opaque writing are problematic. In her reading of Tender

Buttons, Lisa Ruddick, for instance, who offers insightful readings of other moments in the text, admits to being stumped by the offensive instance in “DINNER” and would consider the “needless are niggers” phrase a clear yet isolated moment of potential racism in the text. Ruddick writes that she simply “cannot connect” this line with the rest of her reading of the text. While acknowledging that readers cannot easily “explain (away)” this passage, Ruddick nevertheless concludes that the moment is an anomaly that

“anyone thinking about this poem must simply register as a fragment of bigotry with no context” (246).274

In her Ugly Feelings, Sianne Ngai identifies a racializing strategy that seems relevant to Stein’s strategies here, the white uses of “animatedness” in the various

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 274 Lorna Smedman offers an alternative insight in her reading of other instances of “racialized language” in Stein’s “nonrepresentational texts.” Smedman argues that Stein’s compositionally experimental attempts to distance words from their conventional referents leads her to repeatedly take up racially charged words as particularly provocative challenges, but that resistant to her progressive-experimental and anti- representational intentions these words ultimately retain their negative valences and inevitably evoke violence-inflected histories and overdetermined representations of the body. In commenting on the frequent appearances of the word “nigger”, particularly in Bee Time Vine, Smedman suggests that in such moments, regardless of the general indeterminate quality of the texts, the racial epithets Stein uses resist the destabilizing momentum at work. While I would agree with that point, I disagree with Smedman’s ultimate attribution to Stein of thoroughly textually deconstructive and essentially racially progressive intentions that simply failed to dismantle the inherent racism of words such as “coon.” I believe, rather, that Stein generally works with and textually exploits the productive, sticky racist elements of these words. Smedman notes, agreeing with Aldon Nielsen, that it would be problematic to conclude that the textual play and potential irony within the language of Tender Buttons, for instance, can necessarily mitigate the explosive racist resonances of “needless are niggers.” Though a few instances in Tender Buttons may indicate a challenge to white patriarchal authority (as Ruddick (245) and other feminist critics have suggested), the unconventional constructions in the text only limitedly challenge repressive norms, possibly expanding space for alternative sexualities and redeeming domestic spaces, but also relying on certain “old” and “white” notions of difference and otherness. Such racist and racializing stances, as I have mentioned earlier, were strategically useful to white feminists, who exploited the notion of racial superiority to blacks, Asians, and others to play up their own identification with white men and racial dominance, and to downplay gender differences as trivial in comparison to racial differences. !

219 representational modes through which Asian and African stereotypes in particular are variously figured as unhumanly “animated.”275 Ngai explains that this process is in play particularly in representations of yellow and black bodies, whether the emphasis is on the

“Asian as silent, inexpressive, and. . . . emotionally inscrutable” or on the black body as

“exaggeratedly emotional, hyper expressive, and even ‘overscrutable’” (93), or as what

Silva would call “affectable.” It is primarily “the cultural representation of the African-

American that most visibly harnesses the affective qualities of liveliness, effusiveness, spontaneity, and zeal” and that equates the “African-American subject” with the “always obvious, highly visible body” (95), but, Ngai explains, a similarly objectifying and related dehumanizing move is involved in the “production of the racially marked subject” in Orientalized caricature, when “difference is signaled by the pathos of emotional suppression rather than by emotional excess” (95).276

Stein’s uses of race-related imagery in Tender Buttons seems to involve a tapping into such notions of “animatedness” and the useful fungibility277 of the racially marked

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 275 Ngai also offers a reading of Stein’s work, with specific focus on The Making of Americans and other texts not discussed here, discussing the (primarily early Steinian) textual mode of tedious repetition that she calls “stuplimity,” the effect of “shock” and “boredom” combined that reflects the ideological subject’s relationship to the tedious but seemingly massive and insurmountable system within which he/she functions. 276 I would agree that the relegation of both races to a distinctly dehumanized ontological position is essentially similar and related; both racializing strategies involve the attribution of pathologized affectability (as Silva argues). Ngai’s notion of “animatedness” as a multiply inflected but essentially consistent ontological othering of the raced body bring together the differently manifested, distinct racializations of black and yellow bodies in Stein’s work and in Western cultures in terms of a logically consistent representational subjugation. As Colleen Lye has discussed in America’s Asia, stereotypes of the Asian body in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century U.S. representations often highlighted the machine-like character of the unfeeling Oriental body (134-136). This instrumentalization of the Asian body and its characterization as essentially non-sentient relates to the animalization and commodification of black bodies in U.S. history, which Saidiya Hartman discusses in Scenes of Subjection. 277 “Fungibility” is the term Saidiya Hartman uses often in Scenes of Subjection to describe the representational malleability of the slave’s body.

220 body. Suggestions of the Asian body as colorfully decorative, or as serviceable in the white domestic space, and the animalization and commodified dismemberment of the black body, as well as the association of the “red stranger” with animal flesh all contribute essentially to the attempted construction of white domesticity and white

(literary/cultural) artistry as exemplary manifestations of civilizational and cultural modernity. As an aspiring Euro-American writer, Stein’s exploration of enjoyment- generating, textually innovative uses of words in Tender Buttons reflects the writer’s need to “keep a strange” [body] within the recognizably “white place” for the necessary function it plays by virtue of remaining “estranged” (“BUTTER”), and for the apparent creative potential it enables through the “managed” “spreading” of guarded “difference.”

The enduring incommensurability and even the potential [offensive] shock coloring Stein’s uses of racial difference in Tender Buttons involve both the incorporation and enduring exclusion of [racial] bodies of difference. Stein’s noticeably subversive queering of representation, sensual/aesthetic enjoyment, and middle class domesticity

(such that there is “no use in a centre” (“ROOMS”)) throughout the text seems to stop short of challenging the ontological oppositions of black and white or of Orient and

Occident. In the textually climactic and final paragraph of “ROOMS,” Stein specifically mentions the contrastive binary of “Europe and Asia.” Here, Stein enacts a finalizing textual “engulfment” of sorts on a universal and globally divided scale. In this final passage’s listing of numerous disparities, Europe and Asia figure as the two fundamental incommensurable modes of being in the world. While the reference to these two continents might be an attempt to emphasize the lack of a true “centre” in constructed

221 global categories, it also implies that “Europe and Asia” can be taken to account for the starkest and most distant extremities of utter, insurmountable, and enduring ontological difference. In the imperially and racially divided context of Stein’s early twentieth- century world, and given the racial resonances of the rest of the text, the very mention of these terms together cannot but reinforce the widely ingrained conceptual opposition of the Orient in relation to a Euro-American center.

As unsystematic and opaque as Stein’s writing is in Tender Buttons, the unstable processes of “[e]xplaining,” “confusing,” “supposing,” “question[s] aris[ing],” and

“disturbing a centre” throughout the text vaguely suggest an appreciation of complexity, multiplicity of perspectives, and utterly incommensurable and unabsorbable difference in the domestic space that nevertheless reconstructs “a [merely] different whiteness,” one in which “darkening,” “darkness,” and potentially disturbing “singularity” is embraced but also, especially as manifest in certain colored forms and bodies, continually and necessarily subjugated. The “roast beef” domesticity of white middle-class privilege and even the deviant sensuality celebrated in Tender Buttons relies on both an incorporation of and distancing from the violent consumption of colored bodies for the sake of white enjoyment. While Tender Buttons embraces “difference” and certain modes of

“darkening” in undeniably innovative and meaningful ways, its frame of reference nevertheless remains within the boundaries of a limitedly “different whiteness” as “a wall.”

With all its evocative use of language and its impressive creative joining of compositional-textual play with a clearly non-disinterested celebration of the sights,

222 sounds, flavors and pleasures of the table, the kitchen, the bedroom, and the body, Tender

Buttons is understandably appealing to many poets and a favorite among Stein readers, myself included. As we have seen, the webs of suggestion that arise amidst the attention to the rhythm, sounds, and weight of language are thoroughly intertwined with the

(merely most obvious and strident) racial valences and violences in Stein’s use of

“chinamen” and “niggers” among other words and objects. These particularly charged words work dynamically with other loaded words in the text as important connective elements, not unlike Lacan’s signification-enabling “points de capiton” or “quilting buttons,” which flexibly serve as necessary points of provisional coherence, retroactive meaning-lending, and structural framing. In some ways, the racial-epithets in the text stand out to roughen the surface, as sore “tender buttons” that seem to clash with the lighthearted whimsicality and sensuality of the rest of the text. In another sense, however, insofar as the text is thoroughly infused and laced with racial undertones, overtones, and resonances, they integrally work as elements central to the coherence of the entire piece, as essentially fastening “quilting buttons,” provocative launching

“buttons,” and variously connective “points de capiton.”

223 Chapter 5 Butter and Rose

“What’s in a name? that which we call a rose/ By any other name would smell as sweet.” William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

Civilization begins with a rose. A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. Gertrude Stein, “As Fine As Melanctha”

One night I accidentally bumped into a man, and perhaps because of the near darkness he saw me and called me an insulting name. I sprang at him. . . . Most of the time (although I do not choose as I once did to deny the violence of my days by ignoring it) I am not so overtly violent. I remember that I am invisible and walk softly so as not to waken the sleeping ones. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

It becomes evident upon studying Tender Buttons and Stein’s compositionally innovative practices in other writings of her “portrait” period and beyond that her hyper- attentiveness to the feel, contours, and arrangements of words did not involve a clean break from reality, readability, or the varied historical resonances of words. Rather, at its most engaging moments, her writing attends to the feel of language and accounts for the singularly personal and sensory impressions of the word while also “using everything” by drawing from everything on hand, from details of domestic life in the kitchen and parlor, to love-making, to events in the news. Her playful and repetitive use of the word “butter” is only one illustrative element of a dense repertory of familiarly and innovatively suggestive, singularly arranged word-ingredients that she returned to again and again.

Through the decades, apart from the much discussed sexually-loaded examples of “cow,”

“Caesar,” and “alas,” for instance, are the recurring and mutually generative “button”

224 (“butter”), “mutton,” “lamb,” “wool,” “knit,” “sew,” “needles,” “needless,” “knee,”

“Negro,” “Negroes,” “rose,” “flower,” (“butter” and “flour”),278 “bale,” “pale,” “lily,”

“white,” “whites,” “red” (“read”), “bread” (and “butter”), “pink,” (“ink”), “color” (of

“butter”), “hair,” “air,” “pear,” “care,” “carry,” “marry,” “Mary,” “wedding,” “wet,”

“weeding,” “honey,” “bee” (“Alice B”), “kitchen,” “chicken,” (“butter” and) “eggs,”

“examples,” “excellent,” “pass” (the “butter” and), “peas,” “please,” “pleasure,” “press,”

“express,” “Negress,” “climate,” “climb it,” (“Didn’t Nelly and Lily…”), “chime”

(“Chimes and chinaman carry, they marry too”), “pole,” “polish,” “shine,” “oil,” “lard,”

“fat,” “tea,” “tease,” “Mildred,” “meal dread,” “bed,” and so on.

As we can sense above, part of Stein’s practice in composition unrestricted by representational norms involved relating words and their phonic substance laterally, metonymically, connotatively, through historic and intuitive associations, a tonnage of punnage, and every manner of play. Rather than working as straightforward deep metaphors or keys to some all-encompassing textual code, they contribute to a “lively”

(Stein’s word for her own writing and Shakespeare’s plays), loosely threaded connective meaningfulness in and across specific writing pieces, and they often work together in clusters or constellations that interactively enrich the readability, weight, and pleasure of each text. Stein’s mingled and unexpected uses of all the material available to her through her senses and experience, which we have seen throughout Tender Buttons, work both playfully and intricately together in all her writing to present everywhere openly and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 278 The playful suggestiveness of combinations of “butter,” “flower,” “flour,” “bread,” “read,” “red,” and “rose” alone are endless. For Stein, the art of cooking, the pleasure of flavor, the delight of reading and writing, the evocativeness of colors and culture are all inextricably intertwined.

225 in “secret,” (freely offering without representationally describing) her personal joys, concerns, interests, and preoccupations. It is in such a way that she could celebrate Alice everywhere and in every way in her work while managing to avoid censure in the U.S. for overly explicit sexual content,279 though she would be vociferously criticized for so many other aspects of her writing, especially its apparent nonsensicality and representational- refusal of sorts.

If we allow ourselves to go with the flow of the play of repeated patterns and resonances of language, sounds, and words (as the ones mentioned above) not just in particular passages or texts but also cumulatively through the larger body of writings over the years, we are able (both visually, aurally, and intuitively) to get a fuller sense of the noticeably binding (perhaps buttery?), sticky supplement of race in other words which indirectly relate to and are suffused with the race-saturated tones of Stein’s world, including the profoundly racially and imperially slanted vocabulary and imagery of the day. Not unlike the infusion of the joy and sensual pleasures in her life with Alice everywhere in Stein’s use of language, race noticeably irrupts everywhere in her work and not merely, or even primarily, in the most strident uses of racial epithets, such as

“chinaman/chinamen,” “red Indian,” “Indian boy,” and “nigger” (which are themselves also “pet-words,” repeated even more noticeably than the words noted above in the work beyond Tender Buttons280). As we have seen, these frequently dismissed moments are

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 279 In contrast, Joyce’s Ulysses, for instance, did incite scandal and censuring actions in the U.S. for years upon its publication in 1922. 280 Outside of Tender Buttons, for instance we see repeated uses of “chinaman” and “china,” “red face” and “nigger”—just to name a few of the instances of some of the most offensive epithets smattered throughout: “We tight, Nigger. Nasal, noisete. [sic] Not we when. Butt, but set. All that, cold. Nigh jigger” (“Bee

226 not anomalous, infrequent outbursts but particularly loaded “tender buttons” that work with other recurring, persistent (but merely suggestive, not rigidly fixed) “quilting points”

(in a somewhat Lacanian manner of speaking but also in terms of the everyday and potentially poetic resonances of literal “points de capiton” as “quilting buttons” for upholstery, fabric, and mattresses) that resonate throughout with Stein’s repeated uses of

“butter” and other comestibles, as well as her creative use of color-words, flowers and other ornamental objects, repeated puns and wordplays, and snippets of children’s rhymes. All these elements and words relate in turn to the racially charged suggestions of reproductive “mixing,” “natural phenomena,” Darwinist themes,281 natural and cultural history, and colonial-imperial contexts.282

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Time Vine” 1913); “A cousin to cooning, a cousin to that and mixed labor and a strange orange…” (“White Wines” 1913); “Neglect, so is a china. . . Nervous in sue sees, nervous in sue sees. it was a chinaman, it was a china mean on” (“Meal One” 1914); “What does the nigger say today” (“The King or Something (The Public is Invited to Dance)” 1917); “Chinaman chinese chinaman chinese, Chimes and chinaman carry, they marry too” (“Dolphin” 1921); “Can soldiers surround a chinaman. . . . Scotchmen, Frenchmen chinaman negro and the black races. When will you adopt. You or me, when this you see remember me./ Chinamen are cautious with negroes with Frenchmen with scotchmen and with candles. They are cautious with oil and impoverishment” (“Objects Lie on a Table” 1922); “Black and white and red all over./ One little Indian two little Indian three little Indian boys five little four little three two little one little Indian boy/ . . . .she was not representative. . . . An Indian boy was said to be red./ He leaves no doubt as to this./ An Indian boy is said to be red and he leave no one in doubt of this./An Indian boy or is he red and is there any doubt of this.” (“An Indian Boy” 1923). 281 The moments suggestive of Darwinist, naturalist, and thus racial matters are scattered throughout, along with details that register colonial concerns and conflicts here and there, as I will discuss further below. Stein not only mentions Darwin explicitly (as in Everybody’s Autobiography) as an influential educational and childhood figure, but also mentions Buffon in “Yes You Do” and repeatedly uses words suggestive of naturalist interests, including the ubiquitous “rose,” as well as “butterfly,” “stock,” and others. While not clearly referential or indicative of political or racial concerns in themselves, the intertextual cumulative effect of their repeated incorporation contributes to the particularly racially slanted suggestiveness that saturates the rest of her language plays throughout her corpus. For instance, we find a recurring use of “climate” and “climate and affections” from at least as early on as Tender Buttons in “ROOMS.” Later, in “Land of Nations: And Ask Asia” (1920), we read: “This is a country. A fine country. . . . Egypt and Syrie. . . Climate and the affections/ Jews quote that.” 282 Many readers of Stein have commented on her various writings on (and her disturbing political associations during) the European wars, but few (if any?) have remarked upon the frequent hints at her awareness of living in a thoroughly hierarchized colonial world. Just a small sampling of allusions to the

227 If we consider a word such as “butter” (and all its associates, such as “cream,”

“milk,” “churn,” “white,” “yellow,” “artificial,” “cow”) might work in these texts as a somewhat solidifying/congealing “point de capiton,” then it is to be expected that other proliferative “pet-words” would act just as dynamically in inter-connected webs through and across her individual writings. Again, that is not to say that such words clearly codify or constitute her writing, or to argue that her corpus is primarily “about” race, or that she consciously meditated on race issues, but that the whimsically knitted ties among words (and between words and the world) do not neatly exclude or bracket racial resonances in the text or the racial structures of Stein’s world. If one reads Stein extensively, it becomes apparent that much of the textual, contextual, historical,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! colonies and colonial organization includes: references to “war” and “the Japanese” in “Do Let Us Go Away” (1916); Morocco, an “Arab dinner” and the matter of learning English appear in “Please Do Not Suffer” (1916); in “The King or Something (The Public is Invited to Dance)” (1917) we find “chauffeur,” “Cook,” a servant leaving “her kitchen dirty,” thoughts about “the Chinese” and “the colored regiment” with “What does the nigger say today”; in “Miss Cruttwell” (1917) we read “We had splendid Egyptians…”, “We have come here to think and read about China,” “From the standpoint of white all color is blue,” “the interest in savages,” “I do not believe in South African rebellion,” “Butter charms me,” and “I think about sugar.” In “The Work” (1917) after an opening “Hurrah for America,” we meet “a Captain,” see “the french fight,” “Cooks cook” and read: “This is apropos of the colonials. We see a great many. They fight so bravely and as they have many of them no people they are so grateful we like them so much. And they have such pleasant ways of speaking to each other. We get to talk to them.” In “Dinner” (ca 1920-22), we find: “Who are women./ Love of race.” In “A Hymn” (1920), “South Africa and me/ We think we are so free. . . . We never know who cares./ For a British king or queen so mean./ . . . . And in the middle of Christmas./ There is butter…” In “Dolphin,” we find: “An imitation bird and an imitation heard, can you sing sweetly to me./ This is what Frank says./ Frank says pass me the butter./ Are many willing to go to Sweden./ Chinaman chinese chinaman chinese, Chimes and chinaman carry, they marry too.” In “A Sonatina Followed by Another” we read “And what would you have me do./ I would have you sing songs to your little Jew. . . . In the french sense. In the french sense. Do not be elusive and remember the last sign of the Moor. . . . If Napoleon had a son, we could see Corsica in the morning. We have not seen Corsica yet. / Everybody has mentioned it./ Why can butter be yellow or white./ She is so political. . . . How can you think of everything when roses smell the most and tea pots lean on elephants and a spring is lots. How can you mention orange wear when orange blossoms last how can you laugh at me all day when all day has been passed, splendidly with an Englishman a negro and a Pole who might have had a Russian name. . . . Can we still be a necessity./ Counting horses a large horse named butterfly. / Relieve me relieve me from the Turk. He was not a Turk he was partly Negro. His father came from New Orleans in Louisiana. . . . Do you admire gypsies./ Do you really wear a chinese hat./ We do. . . . Little Alice B is the wife for me. . . . In passing through France she wore a Chinese hat and so did I.”

228 connotative, and associational dynamics and multiply felt contours of the texts are overwhelmingly saturated in race-related tones. In fact, when taken in consideration alongside Stein’s own comments on race, her enduring use of racial epithets in her work, as well as her celebration of the female body and non-normative sexuality (and the fact that her entire generation’s race-complex revolved so much around the body of the woman of color), Stein’s language and compositional arrangements work together to strongly suggest both an unconscious lifelong race obsession and a taking for granted of the ubiquitous use of colored bodies and figures for the consumption, enjoyment, and pleasure of the white western world.

Taking into account the broad strokes of such dynamic intertextual suggestiveness in Stein’s work enriches our reading of particular pieces while also shedding light on numerous meaningful threads of connection “collectedly. . . [c]onnectedly tracing”

(“Subject-Cases” 21) (via direct repetition of words as well as impressionistic webs of indefinite but dense association). As any reader of Stein is aware, “rose” (or “Rose”) is one of the most insistently recurring and richly sedimented words sown (and loosely sewn) throughout Stein’s corpus. Stein’s perhaps most quotable and oft-quoted line, about which she was repeatedly questioned on her American tour, is of course, “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.”283 Many Stein critics have already commented on the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 283 The varied textual, compositional, representational, and even philosophical valences of the line have already been discussed at length, and I won’t repeat them here. At the risk of being formulaic, we might say that the line succinctly enacts and echoes in just so many words a kind of Steinian flair with language, the rhythm and richness of “insistence” in contradistinction to void “repetition”; the variation, proliferation, and originary difference in identity; the visual and aural malleability of words (rose is a rose/arose is arose/rose is arose/roses are roses, etc.); the potential grammatical and functional tension within a word (as between “rose” as a object-noun and “Rose” as a name); the endless chain of sensual, literary, and historic associations evoked by words, sounds, and smells, and so forth.

229 multivalent import of the line, of its original appearance with the form of the proper noun in “Sacred Emily” (1913) (“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”), of Stein’s incorporation of the line (in circular form) as her personalized letterhead and logo, of its succinct commentary on language, writing, difference, repetition, and identity. As with the rich dissemination of “butter” throughout the writings however, the repeated race-rich resonances and placements of “rose” have gone without comment, whether from being simply unnoticed or deliberately (or unconsciously) whited out.

To begin with, Stein’s use of rose in her most well-known phrase, as well as her own commentary on her repetition there illustrate one of the whimsical ways in which she’d play with the feel of the word in its material irreducibility in order to break with convention while at the same time also exploiting and suggesting the multiple connotative, socio-historical, and literary resonances inevitably connected to the word.

Indicating some of the ways in which her attitude towards interesting and serious writing for the twentieth century aligned with the Russian formalists’ call for the necessary

“defamiliarization” of deadened language, Stein commented that given the centuries’ old use of words in English literature, many of them had become “worn-out” and “stale literary words.” Her well-known commentary on the line (in response to questioning students), as recounted by Thornton Wilder, illustrates a distinct co-mingling of her intensely personal, sensory appreciation for words with a personal appreciation for and continual awareness of a literary tradition in English:

Now the poet has to work in the excitingness of pure being; he has to get back that intensity into the language. We all know that it’s hard to write poetry in a late age; and we know that you have to put some strangeness, something unexpected, into the structure of the sentence in order to bring back vitality to the

230 noun. Now it’s not enough to be bizarre; the strangeness in the sentence structure has to come from the poetic gift. . . . I don’t want to put too much emphasis on that line, because it’s just one line in a longer poem. But I notice that you all know it; you make fun of it, but you know it. Now listen! I’m no fool. I know that in daily life we don’t go around saying “is a . . . is a . . . is a. . .” Yes, I’m no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years. (Quoted in Simon 132)

As Stein demonstrated in many of her conversations and in her public lectures, the innovative arrangement and enlivening of words for her was not to be considered cut off from history but in meaningful relation to (rather than dependent reverence for) a known tradition of literature. It is not surprising thus, that, as I will discuss below, elements from all the literature that she enthusiastically devoured from her childhood on would also enter into her own writing. It is perhaps more surprising that these oblique but insistent moments of apparent appreciation for English literature are also intertwined with the ubiquity of race in her writing.

Significantly, Stein’s initial use of “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” in “Sacred

Emily” occurs in conjunction with numerous interwoven suggestions in the text of a tradition of fawning over the “lily”-white, “pale” Anglo-Saxon notions of beauty as well as with cream-based culinary pleasures and allusions to western civilizational/technological “progress.” The poem opens with the lines “Compose compose beds./ Wives of great men rest tranquil” (again evoking themes of sexuality and reproduction which are so central to questions of race); the ensuing lines are filled with words such as “egg” (in which we hear the opening “Egg ear nuts” of the “needless are niggers” passage in Tender Buttons, and evocations again of reproduction), “cousin,”

“pin,” “colored,” and the lines “In strewing, in strewing./ That is the way we are one and

231 indivisible,” all of which reinforces the connectedness of so much of her writing and the ways in which words placed in the same text or in various texts are meaningfully and inextricably tied to each other and resonant with the more overt racist moments in her work.

Before we come to the “rose is a rose” line in “Sacred Emily,” we also find the following passage:

Cunning is and does cunning is and does the most beautiful notes. I would like a thousand most most. Center pricking petunia. Electrics are tight electrics are white electrics are a button. Singular pressing. Recent thimble. Noisy pearls noisy pearl coat. Arrange. Arrange wide opposite. Opposite it. Lily ice-cream. Nevertheless. A hand is Willie. Henry Henry Henry. (389)

This strange but suggestive opening evokes and intertwines in a jumble: naturalist images of sexuality and reproduction, a world tied to “white” technology ruled by the mechanical

“button” (echoing and suggesting a relatedness to other “buttons”), women’s work (in

“pressing,” “thimble,” “pearls,” “coat,” perhaps even particularly invoking work associated with the “chinaman” and the “Jew”), “lily” whiteness and smooth “ice-cream,” and the English-literary “Willie,” as well as English and French royalty in “Henry.”

Importantly, the proximity of “cousin” earlier in the text to “cunning” here (and in the

“rose” passage) tie the entire text to the “cousin to cooning” passage in “White Wines.”

And the statement that “cunning is and does the most beautiful notes,” strongly suggests

232 that all of Stein’s textual “cunning” is crucially “cousin to cooning” throughout her work, that the both imitative attempts at dialect scattered about and the use of racist epithets and imagery are central to the differently sounding “beautiful notes” of her music.

The lines above are rendered even more suggestive by what follows. As we continue on, we read:

Next to barber bury china glass./ Next to barber china and glass./ Next to barber and china./ Next to hurry./ Next to hurry and glass and china. Next to hurry and glass and hurry. . . . Pale./ Pale./ Pale./ Pale./ Pale./ Pale. / Pale./ Near sights. Please sorts.

Argonauts./ That is plenty./ Cunning saxon symbol./ Symbol of beauty./ Thimble of everything./ Cunning clover thimble./ Cunning of everything. . . .

Color mahogany./ Color mahogany center./ Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose./ Loveliness extreme./ Extra gaiters./ Loveliness extreme./ Sweetest ice-cream./ Page ages page ages page ages./ Wiped Wiped wire wire./ Sweeter than peaches and pears and cream. (181, 185, 186, 187)

In the context of what precedes and what follows, we hear in “barber bury china” the juxtaposition of “China” and “barber” [barbaric/barbarous], over and against the preceding “white” and subsequent “pale.” In addition to all the racial, historical, and mythological resonance of “Argonauts,”284 we find as we come upon the famous “Rose”

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 284 Suggestive of both the mythic quest for the Golden Fleece (by Jason and the Argonauts) and the mid- nineteenth-century gold rushers in California, the appearance of this word here is potentially suggestive of various quests for power and riches, lineal power conflicts, the arbitrarily and historically loaded value of gold as substance and color, (of “golden butter”), of American Western expansion and whiteness, of Stein’s own Californian background and memories (and of the ways in which her own family’s status there (as well as other “ethnic” or Jewish-immigrant families from beyond the “Pale”) as passably “white” depended on the vilification of the insufficiently “pale” “golden”-hued “chinamen” from “barber”-ous “china”), of the enduring interconnectedness of Western literary, cultural and symbolic traditions. Against the ethereal valuation of “pale” and “rose” the “Color mahogany” provides an earthy brown contrast, the legacy of Native American names and resources, and the exploitation of the resource by European nations for ship- building. The shipping reference is also embedded in “cunning”—the crucial ship-steering that served literally and symbolically link “china” to the “pale” continent to the native land of “mahogany” in a network reinforced by “cunning” racial discourses and symbols, at the center of which, the English “angel” and “rose.”

233 line, that it appears against the backdrop of (and as) the “Cunning saxon symbol. Symbol of beauty” par excellence, and even more significantly, as a textually connective

“Thimble of everything.” “Rose” works, the text suggests, not referentially as a mere worn-out “symbol,” but as a word in oblique relation to the history of the word and symbol, closely related to “thimble” as a reinvigorated element of a new sort of textual sewing (and sowing), and a part of the oblique relating of all her words in special arrangement in and across the writings. 285 It is significant that elsewhere, and in Stein’s first use of the “rose” line in “Sacred Emily” (the line which became her personal trademark in a sense), rose, like butter, (in addition to being in itself so strongly suggestive of the thoroughly racialized notions of Western European civilization, cultivation, culture, and tastes), is everywhere loaded with and tied to racial meaning.

Given the extensive intertextually recurring activity of so many Steinian pet- words,286 a broad look at Stein’s written corpus is useful here again to show just how persistently “rose” arises throughout, as well as to show how the passage above, in typical Steinian manner, resonates intertextually with and is colored by her repetitions of

“rose” elsewhere. An initial glancing (and far from exhaustive) tracking of “rose” brings up the following rich store:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 285 While there is a hint of critique of Western Anglo-Saxon norms of beauty and femininity above, given Stein’s use of race, color, and raced bodies elsewhere in her corpus, it is likely that such critique would limitedly target only the aspects of white Western discourses of that restricted white women’s roles (as in Stein’s male-dominated literary/artistic spheres) and sexuality, and potentially excluded members of Stein’s “tribe” (Stein’s own word for her Jewish connections, in Q.E.D. and elsewhere). 286 It seems the use of “pet” for these insistently recurring words is appropriate throughout since Stein consistently shows and explicitly states that her love for words, grammar, reading, and writing is loaded with an affection not unlike her intense fondness for (and writerly attention toward) her various dogs (especially the white poodles, Basket and Basket II), as well as her tendency to refer diminutively to Alice as “[her] little jew” and to her “Indochinese” or “Hindoo-chinese” servants as charming “little” men.

234 A darker day is not darker. . . . it has not that complexion. . . . It is not dirty, there is no cleaner passage and the best way to have it all express that is to cook dinner. . . . There was cauliflower and there was cake and there was no steamer and there was butter and there was potato. . . All the time is dark and there is a light and the time to think is the time to paint and the grey blue purple is the red rose color and the pink white cover is the fine broken china. (“Scenes. Actions and Disposition of Relations and Positions” 1913)287

She has been complaining. . . . I cannot listen to Romeo and Juliet. That is where they are./. . . . It makes it look like a Negro./ I speak to my mother as if she were a Negro./ Roses are red and violets too./ Pinks are sweet and so are you./ Roses red and violets blue./ Wheels shine in wheels. . . . She has a skin like pink satin. . . . As a colored person wittily said, Ernest is a name. . . . (“One Sentence” 1914)

The skin has the tint of purity./ Very pleasant to use./ A freshly blown rose. . . . Please be dark. (“Pink Melon Joy” 1915)

A black body and pink clothes and pink feathers, not a black body and pink clothes and pink feathers. . . . She reminds me of the queen of Chinatown. . . . Extraordinary pansies. . . . Gertrude says the ladies are more wonderful than the roses. . . . In honor of the movement./ Row seas./ Yes. . . . Any colored queen./ Do not./ Very colored queen. . . . Letting spice. . . . They’re the sheep./ They are not so special as the ones with the black heads are they./ Able to stand splendidly. . . Beware of wet tar. . . . There are some things a girl can’t do./ Is she doing morris dancing no its only gloves./ With red roses in a side car. (“Possessive Case” 1915)

Listen to me as yet I have no color. Red white and blue all out but you./ . . . .My baby is a dumpling. I want to tell her something/. . . . I do not mention roses./ Exactly./ Actually./ Question and butter./ I find the butter very good./ Lifting belly is so kind./ Lifting belly fattily. (“Lifting Belly” 1917)

Why can butter be yellow or white./ She is so political./ . . . . How can you think of everything when roses smell the most and tea pots lean on elephants and a spring is lost. How can you mention orange wear when orange blossoms last how can you laugh at me all day when all day has been passed, splendidly with an Englishman a negro and a Pole who might have had a Russian name./. . . . Counting horses, a large horse is named butterfly./ Relieve me relieve me from the Turk. He was not a Turk he was partly Negro. His father came from New Orleans in Louisiana. . . . Little Alice B is the wife for me. . . . And what is the difference between white and yellow. And how many lions are golden. . . ./ !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 287 The dates of all these passages here refer to the time of writing not publication, according to the manuscript notebooks as documented in the Yale Collection.

235 Willy nilly with a roasted kid. . . . I took a piece of pork and I stuck it on a fork and I gave it to a curly headed jew jew jew. I want my little jew to be round like a pork, a young round pork with a cork for his tail. (“A Sonatina Followed by Another” 1921)

To an American an Indian means a red skin not an inhabitant of the east or west Indies or of India. . . .When we are astounded astonished concerned received or intimidated we do not recount roses. . . . Do you remember how often we had butter. . . .Thank all who thank me. Other races. I do and you do too you do conceal clouds. Clouds shine and you shine. (“American Biography and Why Waste It” 1922)

As with butter and bread, the sampling of “roses” above illustrates some of the ways in which Stein used and “refused” and “caressed” words. We also sense the varied intimations and pervasive “cloud” of racial tones distinctly animated and inflected by the more direct references such as “negro” and “Indian.”288

We can observe in the words and passages above that, again, Stein’s compositions are remarkably interconnected and that specific words are generative of meaningful readings in countless ways. We cannot address the host of implications and potential readings of race and text above. So I will focus here on just a few of the ways we see

“rose” at work. The most evident contextual elements above that set up the links between

“rose” and race are clear and abundant in the repeated uses of “white,” “yellow,” “black,”

“colored,” “Negro,” and “Indian.” We also see “complexion,” “black body,” “red skin,”

“race,” “tar,” “jew,” “curry,” and “skin like pink satin,” and “butter” in the mix.

Additionally, in numerous ways, even when “butter” is not explicitly mentioned, there noticeably related plays on “butter” as juxtaposed with rose and together relating to race.

All the previously discussed richness of the word (as it relates to the racial anxieties and !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 288 There are other Stein texts and passages in which “rose” appears along with uses of “butter” and other more explicit evocations of race that I do not discuss here.

236 discourses of the period) is present in the repetitions of “butter” and “butterfly.” But insofar as it was and is so foundational to Western (both French and American) cooking and Stein’s writing, it also indirectly resounds when unstated, in the mention of other foods such as “cauliflower,” “cake,” “potato,” “dumpling,” “flour,” and even the homophonic “flower”; butter’s active transformative and creative amalgamative qualities seem to be at work in figuring the singularity of Stein’s compositional linking of words

(and the sounds and look of language) to life (and all the senses) through a purposeful refusal of representational expression, as suggested in the passing statement: “there is no cleaner passage and the best way to have it all express that is to cook dinner”

(“Scenes…” above).

If we look elsewhere in Stein’s corpus, we find even more oblique (and simultaneously explicit) linkings of the resonant racial tones between “rose” and “butter.”

Both common usage and various lines above obviously relate “roses” to “red,”289 and

“red rose” is as familiar a coupling as “bread and butter.” Given Stein’s frequent plays with portmanteau words and homonyms, it would not be a stretch thus to read and hear

“read” as well as rose’s “red” in “bread (and butter).” And so we might say that “rose” is a part of the familiar word clustering around “butter” and that the appearance of one in the text is implicitly suggestive of and loosely knitted to the other. In Stein’s 1913

“Miguel (Collusion). Guimpe. Candle,” for instance, both “rose” and “red” are whimsically embedded in and intertwined with a cluster of “butter” related words:

Collection of eggs white, white as know excellent. . . . A bland is curtain grease with a fine tart. A field might a field might. Blame cross extermination. Please !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 289 And there is the evocative phrasing “the red is rose” from Tender Buttons as well.

237 porouses. Please porouses contumely. A glass plate. A glass white is a shadow in the bun. A shadow in the began oar box. Or not pleasing. Or not white. In read old lozenges. Instead. In that bread. In that bred and a lower a real old heard, a real cold curry able to be at it with a crush in without, with out all ox holds at neither best. (“Miguel (Collusion). Guimpe. Candle.” 1913)

Butter is obliquely present above in the grouping of “eggs white,” “grease,” “fine tart,” and its obvious companion “bread,” as well as in the cattle-evoking terms “bred,”

“heard,” and “ox.” We find “roses” in “porouses” as well as in the “red” of “bred” and

“bread.” “Bred” here coupled here with “cross extermination” (and “bread”—another unexpected, textually and phonically appositional link between race (as breed) and butter) is strongly suggestive of the naturalist obsession with breeding (of roses and races) and all the botanical, scientific, biological, and profoundly racially charged discourses of the turn-of-the-century in both the U.S. and Europe.290 The combinatory plays on multiple cross-lingual and culinary levels here is impressive. In all this, for instance, we even find the embedded suggestion of the culinary significant “roux” produced by the combination of flour and butter (which combine to make “roux”) —and in the text, “flower(s)”

(including “roses,” “violets,” etc.) and “butter” combine to suggest the “roux”/”red” of rose, further reinforcing the relation between butter and rose.

All the implications above regarding reproductive practices, mixing, and race are thus also reflected on the surface of the text in the proliferation of potential readings and resonances that come across through the suggestive permutations and deviant

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 290 With their rich diversity, ornamental beauty, and creative hybridizing possibilities, roses were of key interest to naturalists and biologists, including Darwin and his contemporaries. Darwin was particularly fascinated with their capacity to illustrate the effects of sexual selection and variation (Endersby 78). (Stein’s recurring “butterfly” also had this naturalist, Darwinian flavor being as the butterfly was a favorite naturalist and Orientalist collectible.)

238 combinatory (reproductive/sexual) arrangements in Stein’s use of words and sounds (not separable from the apparently creatively nourishing and unconventionally reproductive

“transgressive” arrangement with Toklas). And the ever-present concern with breaking into newer writing and reading practices is also whimsically embedded above, in another potential play on the “read” in “red” and “roux.” The textual suggestions of “roux” evoke the appearance of Madame Roux, one of Stein’s housekeepers, 291 elsewhere in

Stein’s work. And there we see more related plays on “red,” “read,” “rose,” “butter,” and

“flour/flower” evoked in the suggestiveness of the literal translation of Mme Roux into

“Ms. Red,” in which we hear “misread” and “Miss/Ms. read” (as opposed to a “Mr.” reading). The intertwining of the textual, reproductive, and racial thus converge interestingly in the body of the working woman and the reading/writing woman in Stein’s world. As far-out as these unconventional webs of suggestion might seem, they are not out of line with Stein’s expansive compositional using and mixing of everything at hand, including the names (and bodies) of her servants over the years.

The textually serendipitous confluence of race, butter and flower, cooking, and color in the female servant’s body and name (and labor) that we find in Roux further brings up the compositional role of the bodies and names of Stein’s “Indochinese” servants. Toklas mentions in her Cookbook that they had over the years employed several “Indo-Chinese” cooks. The racializing (and racist) attitude that comes across in her affectionate account of the “Chinese” servants in particular is in keeping with the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 291 Stein mentions her “long-time housekeeper” (Editor’s note in Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vecthen 688) Madame Roux in various letters and at least one compositional piece (seen in AFAM or BTV).

239 spirit of Stein’s own writing on them (which I will discuss further below) and provides useful context on the place of the servants in the Stein-Toklas household. Toklas writes:

It was then that we commenced our insecure, unstable, unreliable but thoroughly enjoyable experiences with the Indo-Chinese.

Trac came to us through an advertisement that I had in desperation put in a newspaper. It began captivatingly for those days: “Two American ladies wish---- “There were many candidates. Trac was my immediate choice. He was a person with neat little movements and a frank smile. He spoke French with a vocabulary of a couple of dozen words. A lobster was a small crawfish, and a pineapple was a pear not a pear. The Chinese cooking was delicate, varied and nourishing. To see Trac, immaculate in white, slicing in lightning quick strokes vegetables and fruits was an appetiser.

. . . .Of course there was no way of knowing how Trac prepared any of his delicious food. . . . That year with Trac had spoiled us. I suggested that he find another Indo-Chinese for us. In his pretty childish way he said we wouldn’t like any other Indo-Chinese, none of them were nice like he was.

And they weren’t. We soon discovered that they had none of his amiable weaknesses. We had a succession of them. Each one in turn was either a gambler, which made him morose when he lost (and he always lost, for he did not work when he won), or he drank, which was unthinkable in our little home, or he loved women and would become dishonest, or he was a drug addict and he would not be able to work. Of the many we tried before Trac reappeared, Nguyen was the most satisfactory and one of the three best cooks we were to have in our long and varied experience. He would drink gently and harmlessly, for he cooked marvelously. He had been a servant in the household of the French Governor- General of Indo-China, who brought him to France. . . . Gertrude Stein and I thought Nguyen delightfully Chinese. (186–188)

The racializing, Orientalist fascination with and consumption of the Asian servant above is clear. Both Trac and Nguyen (the two servants Stein also specifically mentions by name, in her manner of naming them) are consistently depicted as diminutive, immature,

“childish,” effeminate (“pretty”) and feminized, drug- or drink-addicted, and simple- minded. Toklas’s gaze is typically Orientalist in its preoccupation with not “knowing how” Trac prepared his food and in her characterization of him and Nguyen as so

240 “delightfully Chinese.” Their bodies and service are conflated with the consumable quality of their cooking—watching Trac is as much “an appetiser” as the food itself, and the exotic charm of their very persons (as in their mysteriously “unreliable” ways and their important subordinated and contrastive racial positioning in their relationship with

Stein and Toklas) is obviously as “nourishing” and “enjoyable” as their cooking.

Stein, on her part, wrote a short piece focusing on an Indochinese servant after her return from the U.S., “Butter Will Melt” (1936). Stein mentions in Everybody’s

Autobiography (1937) that she had “just written a story about [Nyen] called Butter Will

Melt,” which the Atlantic Monthly found “delectable. . . . like his cooking” (167). Based on her description of him as an affable drunk and an amazing cook, it is likely that the

“Nyen” of Everybody’s Autobiography is the same “delightfully Chinese” “Nguyen”

Toklas mentions in above. In the actual text of “Butter Will Melt,” the name of the

“hindoo chinaman” is changed to “Lien.” The change in name and any actual resemblance to one of the actual servants would be trivial, but the question of naming here seems potentially meaningful, especially given Stein’s attention to names and naming, which she at times dismisses as uninteresting, but which enters as a significant aspect of representation and identity in Everybody’s Autobiography. She writes that she

“used to think the name of anybody was very important” but that “anybody nowadays can call anybody any name they like” (10). This is especially the case, it seems, for “Chinese servants,” whose names are unknowable, unreliable, and apparently irrelevant:

“sometimes the name they say they are has nothing to do with what they are they may have borrowed or gambled away their reference and they seem to e there or not there as

241 well with any name and anyway the Oriental, and perhaps a name there is not a name, is invading the Western world” (11). In light of such a racially circumscribed notion of naming and a somewhat primitivist attribution of indifference towards individual naming and identity to the “Oriental” in particular, the slippage of “Nguyen” into “Nyen” and then “Lien” is not a neutral exercise of artistic license, but a part of the common, flippantly imposing Western-imperial erasure, misuse, and abuse of indigenous Asian names, languages, and bodies.

Stein’s attitude toward the Oriental name stands in distinct contrast to her treatment of other people’s names, including her own. In Everybody’s Autobiography,

Stein relates that during their 1934–35 tour to the U.S., she was enthralled by seeing her name in lights in New York (on an “electric sign moving around a building. . . . Gertrude

Stein has come” (Everybody’s Autobiography 180)) and so amused by the fact that so many people on the street recognized her, knew her name, and would so “nicely” and

“pleasantly” greet her with a friendly “How do you do Miss Stein” (Everybody’s

Autobiography 180). In itself, it is unremarkable (though amusing), to read of all of

Stein’s encounters with prominent writers, artists, entertainers, and academics. She and

Toklas were even invited to the White House and had tea with Eleanor Roosevelt. Her new acquaintances’ and friends’ names are scattered throughout Everybody’s

Autobiography (just as the names of now famous artist and writer friends filled the earlier

Autobiography), while, of course, apart from a couple of exceptions, nearly all the

“Negro intellectuals” (206) and other people of color she met were simply called “Negro” and “colored.”

242 Of course, Stein famously dismissed nouns for being uninterestingly referential, as “names” of anything. She also, obviously, had much affection for certain nouns and names, playing with them repeatedly, and they figure importantly in her composition.

She both played with the material malleability of noun-words as names and used them freely in a no-nonsense, pragmatic manner. In many of her most interesting compositional moments, we see her put words to work in ways that shun the simply descriptive, representational function of nouns, since “if you feel what is inside that thing you do not call it by the name by which it is known” (“Poetry and Grammar”). One area though, in which she impatiently brackets concerns regarding aesthetic or compositional innovation is in speaking of different racial groups:

I know they do not want you to say Negro but I do want to say Negro. I dislike it when instead of saying Jew they say Hebrew or Israelite or Semite, I do not like it and why should a Negro want to be called colored. Why should he want to lose being a Negro to become a common thing with a Chinaman or a Japanese or a Hindu or an islander or anything any of them can be called colored, a Negro is a Negro and he ought to like to be called one if he is one, he may not want to be one that is all right but as long as he cannot change that why should he mind the real name of them. . . . I have stated that a noun to me is a stupid thing, if you know a thing and its name why bother about it but you have to know its name to talk about it. Well its name is Negro if it is a Negro and Jew if it is a Jew and both of them are nice strong solid names and so let us keep them. (Everybody’s Autobiography 206)

In simply reductive and projecting terms, Stein clearly announces that when it came to speaking of race, there was nothing problematic in her not actually knowing whatever was “inside” the “thing” in question, that all that mattered was that she was happy with whatever words were in use, and that she was oblivious to (or had no trouble dismissing) the consequential differences in being named a “Jew,” a “Negro,” a “Chinaman,” the stark difference between being “ethnic” white and being “colored.” She seemed to

243 unquestioningly enjoy the fact that in planning her tour, she could spend so much time fussing over what the food in the American hotels would be like rather than having to consider the restrictions of where she could be served. (Then there’s the fact that she took a “Negro” neighborhood and Chinamen neighborhood tour with the Chicago police one evening… And her marked discomfort with the lessening of segregation in certain areas—more on that in the conclusion perhaps.)

The easy slippage from Nguyen to Lien in “Butter Will Melt” is thus not altogether insignificant. In the renaming we see a typical Westernizing or colonizing move that selects a word or name that seems more familiarly readable or pronounceable for English and French speakers, though in being used as a name “Lien” simultaneously retains the proper mark of foreignness and racially other Asian-ness. 292 The equally imposed, objectifying construction and racial-naming of “Lien” as “something that is called a Hindoo chinaman” also involves an already racially-positioning and racist-ly- charged perceptual and constitutive act, a characteristic part of the French (and generally

Western) invention of a “Phantasmatic Indochina” (Norindr) according to white desire and imagination. The thorough identification of “Lien”/Nyen/Nguyen with cooking and especially with the all-essential, all-suggestive “butter” reduces him to his racial and flavorfully consumable charms and services. Lien’s supposedly natural mastery over butter, which apparently does “not melt” for just anyone according to the piece, is !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 292 The French colonial/imperial dismissal of natal ties, names, and languages among colonized populations was evident in the exclusionary and prescriptive processes set up for those interested in applying for French citizenship. A part of the “long and difficult” application process required “that new citizens adopt a French family name,” which often caused particular confusion among the Vietnamese since, as among other Asians, “the extended family’s name was the first name listed” in their language. (Quinn 145)

244 reflected in Stein’s exploitation of the servant-subject’s “delectable” malleability as singular raw material transformed into a rare compositional dish in the poet’s hands.

If the oblique compositional slant in Stein’s texts above blur the race-issue or representational intent in her uses of Trac, Lien, and Chinamen, the unambiguously and consistently gay and lighthearted tone of amusement that characterizes Stein’s and

Toklas’s every mention of the “Indo-Chinese”—in addition to calling Nguyen

“delightfully Chinese,” Toklas writes that Trac had “the gayest, most innocent and infectious laughter”—is importantly telling of a racially privileged indifference and willful ignorance on the part of white Westerners benefiting from the fruits of brutal, obviously racially organized but palatably (for whites) propagandized and presented colonization. The deluded projection of paternalist affections on the part of masters (or mistresses) with regard to their servants is also characteristic of Stein and Toklas’s necessarily racially and economically prescribed positions in these relations. In both

Stein’s and Toklas’s accounts, we see a projection of their one-sided impression of utter familial joy and gaiety onto violently (on the colonial stage) imposed roles and relations.

Both Toklas and Stein show a desire not only to consume and enjoy Asian cooking and bodies, but also to be the recipients of reverent affection in the process. Toklas mentions that in their experience with numerous servants, “it had come to our being pleased when they were pleased with us” (Cookbook 180). Stein emphasizes the familial nature of their relationship with Trac, assuming and insisting, “we love him and he loves us” (129). She speaks in possessive and paternalist tones of him as of a pet: “Trac was our first Indo-

Chinaman and he loved us and we loved him. I imagine that often happens with anything

245 although Nyen who came later was better to be sure he drank, but you cannot have everything” (Everybody’s Autobiography 160). Stein’s accounts of the “love” in the mistress-servant relations with Trac are not only typically imperialist, but specifically echo various ways in which French writers and government and military officials spoke of Indochina. The French spoke of fallen compatriots as those who “loved Cochinchine unto death,” and constantly claimed to “love and be loved by Indochina” (Matsuda 142).

Like all of the white colonizing West, Stein allowed her own feelings of enjoyment and affection to blur any unpleasant racial and ethical realities.

Trac’s racial significance as an essentially simple Oriental, as a thoroughly knowable and controllable (rather than unpredictably free or complex) “little man” (EA

129) (whose simple people believe in “phantoms” (129)), comes across in other explicit terms as well. In concert with the reductive and one-sided characterization of Trac and

Nyen throughout Everybody’s Autobiography, Stein illustrates to what extent the unstated racial framework of empire constitutes her view and understanding of Trac. He is both totally invisible and hypervisible in his utter reducibility to a notion of his person as a flat, opaque racial mark. Stein writes, “Trac anybody can remember what Trac is, nobody has seen him lately but that does not matter Trac is always faithful to his memory, and his memory is being present ever after” (162). It seems that in the writer’s mind, the actual presence of Trac is irrelevant in terms of readily available notions of him as always self-same, simple, material. The racialized image of Trac, Stein’s “tiny Indo-

Chinaman” (Everybody’s Autobiography 171), is portably contained, “being present ever

246 after” as the enduring material “track” or “trace” of his name and body, as the leftover excess of formless race.

The suggestive linking (here “lien” comes into play again) of Trac to the imprinted “track” and “trace” of race (embedded both in his body (for the Western viewer) and his name—which also happens to evoke the sounds of “race track”) appears in another passage in Stein’s reminiscences about Trac. In the middle of going on about how much she and Toklas “loved” Trac and how much he “loved” them, Stein mentions that her painter friend Francis Rose was in “Indo-China” and had just sent her his

“drawings of Indo-China boys he had as servants” with written descriptions on the backs of the drawings (160), which are embedded into her own story:

Annamite boy sent by the Cochin China government house. . . .

Annamite boy stayed a day or two was not bad but knew nothing about being a valet was formerly engineer but smoked opium which makes it impossible to keep them.

Anig boy Mother Tonkinoise traces of Lo Lo in facial construction. Silent and willing but quite untrained could not leave Saigon and could not speak French.

Beri Annamite boy pleasant but lazy from Hui lasted two days.

So Trac was our first Indo-Chinaman since then we have had so many that we cannot remember all of them but Trac was the first one. . . . a Chinaman even an Indo-Chinaman is always pleasant to have with one and so we had Trac. (Everybody’s Autobiography 160)

Here the associations between “Trac” (as word, name, servant, and mark) and the apparently readable “traces” of race in the “facial construction” of the Asian servant are clearly visible. Both Stein and her friend Francis “Rose” freely employ, exploit,

247 interchangeably conflate, and reduce the colonized South Asians as raw material for artistic and domestic use.

Stein’s insistently romanticized accounts of her/their relationship with Trac are clearly inseparable from the broader backdrop of sexually colonizing, racially mixing, and anxiety-producing aspects of French, European, and American empire-building. In its relations with many of its colonies, including its territories in Southeast Asia, France’s framing of colonial aggression as pleasant “histoires d’amour” and the recounting of conquest in “sexualized language” was common (Matusda 140, 141) and would have been in everyday circulation in Stein’s France.293 The sexualized bodies and exploited names of “Trac” and “Lien” resonate even further in this context. Across Indochina, as in other colonies, France facilitated economic and administrative control by penetrating into the hinterlands of the territories with the laying of railroad tracks and development of new rail lines (Brocheux 129; Del Testa 319-21). Both representationally and physically,

South Asian territories and bodies were feminized, sexualized, and figured as willingly open to the inscription and projection of Western “civilization” and desire.294

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 293 As Elizabeth Ezra, Dana Hale, Panivong Norindr, Kathryn Robson, Jennifer Yee, have also shown, France in the first decades of the twentieth century was absolutely inundated with exoticist, primitivist, and Orientalist images in all sorts of media and in the form of product brand trademarks. Specifically, with regard to typical colonial/Orientalist sexually exploitative perspectives on the colonies, the Indochinese and Asian and South Asian women, Robson and Yee for instance, mention that numerous novels and other texts circulated romanticized, sexualized, feminized images of the colonies as sites for “easy relationships” with native girls, exotic mistresses, etc. (Robson and Yee 5–6) 294 This is of course a familiar aspect of other strands of Orientalism as well. Lily Chiu discusses elements of the French version of this representational stance toward their Indochina: “the natives are constructed as feminine and submissive, regardless of their gender. Their model is the generic congaie, a Vietnamese term meaning daughter or girl. . . . which is appropriated by the French colonials to mean mistress or “wife” (another term being petites épouses (little wives) as in the title of Myriam Harry’s 1901 novel)” (140).

248 Whether wittingly implied or not, Stein’s renaming of her servant as “Lien” also happens to resonate with the sexually subjugating Orientalism and imperialism in white racist desire and practice. The name “Lien” is both, at least visually, sort of a transitional construction between the too Asian “Nguyen” and something potentially more readable to a Westerner. As a potential “lien” (in the French sense) both linguistically and racially, it might also evoke the fact that the French tended to view the Indochinese as culturally or racially a step closer to whiteness than those in the African colonies, thus differently exploitable and more easily civilizable. For Stein, insofar as “Lien” is textually determined by all the race-infused tones of “butter,” “Lien” served as a key reminder that the yellowness of the “yellow” helped to further tie whites like Stein to the centers of whiteness. As in the U.S., in French-Indochinese relations, racially circumscribing boundaries in terms of “white and yellow” (e.g. French hotels in

Indochina wouldn’t serve “yellow” natives—not unlike “whites only” businesses in the

U.S.), were crucial in serving to define and control sexuality, reproduction, gender roles, and imperial hierarchies.

In addition to being identified with butter, the servant figure of “Lien” also embodies the stereotypical representation of Asian women as sexually available and submissive—apparently, in Vietnamese, something like “Lien” is a popular girl’s name that means or is related to “lotus flower.” The English tones of the word fittingly designate “Lien” as a body reduced to a sort of property, purportedly most significant insofar as he exists for his white employers. “Butter Will Melt” celebrates “Lien” as a naturally gifted cook, showcases him as simple though also opaquely Oriental servant,

249 and in a sense both consumes and recolonizes him. Another significant contextual detail is that butter he was introduced to the Vietnamese by the French (Heldke 30-31), another trace, however welcome as itself, of colonial and racial subjugation.

To return to the racial and textual “lien” between race, butter, flour/flower, and rose, we find further resoundingly racial intimations of “rose” in another of Stein’s repetitions of “Rose is a rose” (which are even more racially impactive when contrasted with the Orientalist image of the lotus), where the “rose” repetitions are explicitly linked to the presence of “Chinamen” in the West and imperial discourses on “civilisation”

(applicable to both the U.S. and France, but particularly suggestive of the French

“mission civilisatrice” ). That Stein’s trademark “rose” line appears in “As Fine As

Melanctha,” which was written at the behest of an editor’s request for her to send him something “as fine as Melanctha” (from Three Lives) is loaded with significance.295

Stein was no doubt both ironically teasing and compositionally serious as she produced and submitted a piece entirely unlike the “Melanctha” of Three Lives (in compositional terms) straying far from the earlier work’s (relatively) representationally oriented narrative technique.

The “rose” (calling back/black to the openly and crudely racialized figure of Rose in the earlier “Melanctha”) reappears in “As Fine As Melanctha” for instance, in one of

Stein’s notably oblique or “difficult” modes—it is worth considering passages from the text at length for various elements of the surrounding context: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 295 Stein mentions in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) that editor Harold Loeb invited her to submit “something of hers that would be as fine as Melanctha” for the journal Broom. Apparently not along the lines of what the editor had hoped for, the piece wasn’t published until its posthumous inclusion in the Yale volumes of collected Stein writings (1954) (Meyer 93).

250 How can they be deprived of Negroes. Please black my boots. Please black the surface of the earth. Please I remember very well when it was fashionable to own a black and tan. A dog of a certain race. . . . How sweetly Americans love Chinamen Spaniards and watches. How sweetly they press themselves together. . . . And now let us mingle Harden Kitty Buss the Egyptian and the sister the Armenian and the sisters I never deceive anybody. . . . We sang bitterly but we are not afraid of going further into civilization. . . . And now as to civilisation. Harden, do not harden, harden and win from a woman, win a pin from a woman, and did they know who we were. We were their saviors. . . . A continued story. Civilisation begins with a rose. A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. It continues with blooming and it fastens clearly upon excellent examples. After that it does not mingle it does not readily mingle with windows. It prefers to be colored by sweets. And how sweets are sweets. . . . I do not know why they call it a dream. I really do not know how to dream. Do you. Fill the Jew. With what. With butter. Thank you so much for all that good butter. . . . And after that it does not matter at all whether they are willing to be individual, separate or painstaking. It does not matter at all whether women, white women and children, and children and women, white women, and children, white children. . . . And white and yellow. I remember exactly how I feel about races about races of men. And conversations. Lilies feel white, and yellow lilies feel like Saint John. . . . I choose Christmas and I choose an education. And I choose a robust jew. . . . In the first place we remember the wood we burned and the Chinamen we met and the splendid examples we had of letter writing and then we wished to replace dishes. . . . We met once and we said, honey we like honey flavored with orange blossoms. . . we have been judges of honey. Do you find honey fluid or thick. Do you prefer your soup thin or thick. Do you prefer to increase or decrease your sons, do you resemble yourselves more than you did. Nigger nigger never die black face and china eye. Do you prefer color or colors. And do you prefer sustained impressions. (“As Fine As Melanctha” 1922)

It is evident that such a piece would have disappointed someone asking for something like “Melanctha” (in its popular readability as narrative, its “authentic” handling of

“dialect,” and its abundance of familiar racialist tropes and language). The passage (in

Steinian terms) articulates the tightly interwoven and fat, “fluid” mingling of butter and rose and words that “please” and “harden” and “do not harden”296 and “pin” and “color”

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 296 Here we find further perceptible and suggestive ties to the more explicit evocations of race in Stein’s early “Melanctha” piece in the juxtaposition of “Negroes,” “rose,” and “harden” in the text—which recall Rose, Jane Harden, and all the “Negroes” in the Three Lives story.

251 and “thin” and “thick[en],” that “bloom” and “fasten” (without ever adequately presenting or standing in for) “clearly upon excellent examples” as relating obliquely to, always beside and in the midst of race, meaningfully charged words and objects, and the elusive “area of act” of the racial even when not presuming to represent these things adequately or decisively.

The lines from “As Fine As Melanctha” above potentially comment ironically in some ways on the notion of “civilisation” beginning with a “rose.”297 As an evocation of the beginnings of order, cultivation, domestication, and proper breeding, “rose” as a symbol of whiteness and white womanhood (as the “white rose” or “English rose”) is a clearly contrived, problematic, and overdetermined element of imperial and patriarchal discourses.298 Linking the founding of civilization to “rose” in such a manner also

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 297 Though it is possible, as some might claim, that Stein is being thoroughly ironic in the inclusion of the most races utterances of this text (and other writings), and potentially parodically critiquing rather than uttering herself such things as we read above, I find such a posture on her part unlikely. Since it is indeterminable, we must always guess at and inevitably defer or loosely posit our impressions of the strategically and importantly indeterminable, but regardless of the question of whether or not Stein identified with and/or attempted to critique the racism latent in such soundings and phrasings, that such matters were preoccupying and significant in her writing is clear. My own personal impression is that the very frequency of the racial epithets and racist-sounding statements smattered throughout her writings suggest a sense of permissibility and fluency that belies a necessarily racialist and effectively racist blindness to the intrinsic violence of such statements as they’re excreted from the mouths or pens (or now, pressed out of the keys) of subjects arguably speaking from, or at least calling upon, a position of racial privilege. 298 In some ways, in “Sacred Emily” as well, there are suggestions of a subversive challenge to the especially Anglo-Saxon reverence for the “rose” as related to virtue, racial purity, and femininity, as later in the poem we find the “Loveliness extreme” and “Sweetest ice-cream” displaced by “[e]xcessively illigitmate.” [sic]/ Pussy pussy pussy what what./ Current secret sneezers” and “Table linen./ Wet spoil./ Wet spoil gaiters and little spools little spools or ready silk lining” (187). Here, the sexual subversion of pristinely cultivated beauty is “tied,” as it were, (especially via the link between “spoils” and “spools”), to the unconventional textual threadings and sewing that depart from normative pressures toward communicative clarity. The obliquity of Stein’s distinct “lively” use (a term Stein also uses in her Lectures) of centuries-old language makes “symbol,” “thimble” and “spools” work to thread together textual moments that neatly symbolize or directly refer to things or to each other, but that are noticeably and evocatively relatable to the more strident race-evoking passages. If we follow a playful chain of thought, for instance, “thimble” and “spools” might bring to mind Stein’s recurring use of various forms of “sew,” “knit,” “buttons” (and “tender buttons”298), and “needles,” which might lead us to “needless” (which

252 intimates the necessary symbolic, discursive, and ontological production of “Negroes”

(word which contains “rose”) and the “Coal Black Rose,” the black (woman’s) body as the sine qua non of white “civilization.” But the irruptions of such critique in the text are at odds with its general tone in the use of language, properly seasoned with repeated uses of “nigger” and “Chinamen,” that aligns the text in spirit with “Melanctha,” as part of a

“continued story” (of Euro-/American-racism).299 The recurring rapprochement of butter and rose above, juxtaposed as they are with “Chinamen” and yellow (also in light of the collection of rose varieties and other resources from Asian and South Asian regions),300 additionally evokes white representational (and physical) uses of the Asian body, the

“yellow” rose (or the “exotic” lotus) as distinct from the “white rose,” “white women,” and “white children” in the building of white civilization. The opposition of the “white and yellow” when yellow evokes the degenerate racial stain of “Chinamen” notably serves the interests of the “robust jew” above, who is (in stark contrast to necessarily

“colored” “Chinamen”) able to appreciate “all that good butter,” presumably in any potentially non-Kosher context (as well as all forms of “roast” and “pork”—mentioned in

“A Sonatina…” above and recurrent elsewhere). And we might read that the wholesome

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Stein juxtaposes with “needles” at times), which of course, in turn inevitably echoes the insistently strident “needless are niggers” passage. 299 The appearances of “rose” above also evoke the grossly racist construction of “Rose Johnson” (enduring despite repeated critical attempts to spin the racist elements of “Melanctha” differently)—Rose the “real black negress,” “coarse, decent, sullen, ordinary, black childish Rose,” who embodies the “simple, promiscuous unmorality of the black people.” 300 The Empress Josephine, for instance, had a flourishing conservatory of exotic plants and an extensive rose collection (Brenner 95-97), which included at least one variety from China (97). And British gardeners by the early nineteenth century grew varieties that “came to England from the Far East” (Brenner 100).

253 “jew” above is also figured as closer to “white” than “yellow” in being willing to “choose

Christmas” and “an education.”

Beyond the most immediate textual webs around rose in these passages

(especially given the prominence of “rose” in the corpus), the centrality of the rose to

English, Western European, and Euro-American cultural and literary traditions is also relevant in reading Stein’s rose. As a “queen of flowers” (Brenner 112), “rose” works in

Stein’s text as both flexible phonic substance and as a word with rich and heavy historical sedimentation. Even for those not too familiar with the Anglophone literary tradition and the history of Western Europe, Stein’s “rose is a rose” can bring to mind a host of impressions, symbolic resonances, connotations, and visual, fragrant, and culinary sensations. Especially for Stein and others familiar with the English and European tradition, roses were (and are) loaded symbols of femininity, cultivation, racial purity (or hybridity), and imperial, royal, and civilizational glory, and the arbitrary assignation of values and taboos through symbols and names. Against the backdrop of Stein’s frequent mention of Shakespeare and her repeated discussions of naming,301 a line that immediately and resonantly comes to mind would be the oft-quoted “. . . a rose/ By any other name would smell as sweet” (from Romeo and Juliet Act II, scene II)—a literarily loaded statement on the non-equivalence of word and content/substance and a charged

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 301 We see mention of and indirect gestures toward Shakespeare and naming not solely but perhaps most notably in Stein’s various “Lectures in America” (especially in “What is English Literature” and “Plays”) and her piece “Henry James,” part of Four in America. Ulla Dydo has also discussed the influence of Shakespeare felt in Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation.

254 rending of representational impulses in language.302 As a telling statement of how she viewed the mark of her own writing, Stein praised Shakespeare and his contemporaries specifically for not treating words as mere transparent vehicles for meaning, but as words: “They did not care so much about what they said although they knew what they said meant a great deal but they liked the words, and one word and another word next to the other word was always being chosen.” In Stein’s opinion, English literature lost its way after that insofar as writers gave way to the “confusion” of their “intention to say what they are saying” rather than focusing on the sound and feel of “words next to each other.303 This literary context is an inseparable part of the overall historical and everyday background from which she gathered material and selected words.304

In light of Stein’s love for Shakespeare and her familiarity with English literature, her use of “rose” is inevitably suggestive of a host of problems of representation, race, lineage, language, and naming. The echo of the “rose by any other name” line alone ties

“rose” to the canonical figure of Shakespeare (in every repetition of rose, and also explicitly in its initial appearance in “Sacred Emily” with “Willie”), emblem of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 302 Stein’s compositional innovation diverged from the erudite tones and often heavy-handed literary- allusiveness of some of her “modernist” contemporaries, but she was still quite familiar with and evidently felt personally close to English and American literary traditions.

303 These terms come up in Stein’s discussion of Renaissance literature in her piece “What is English Literature” (207, 208). 304 From numerous instances in Stein’s Lectures, for example, we can gather that Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, both on stage and as text, were indeed both everyday and cultural elements of her childhood, an important component of the “everything” that she read as a youth in California. She often refers to Shakespeare’s poetry and plays as given familiar examples of what has been done in English literature when trying to make various points about writing. Stein states in her lecture, “What is English Literature” that Elizabethan literature had a certain “glory” about it because of writers’ particular treatment of words in arrangement (207). And she also claims that as a child she “always read” and “read everything there was to read,” including “everything that was ever written in the nineteenth century,” and “almost. . . everything that was written in English in the eighteenth century, poetry prose and history, philosophy memoirs and novels” (212).

255 Anglo/European literary culture, whose poetic corpus importantly serves as a “Cunning

Saxon symbol,” “Symbol of beauty,” eventually a “Thimble of everything.” Not only is the body of Shakespeare’s writings central in the sewing together of so many elements of

Anglo- and Euro-white civilization and culture, but it also acts as a sort of protective

“thimble” for white bodies and white cultural institutions as a gatekeeping standard of superior “Symbol”-making, of purportedly objective poetic “beauty” (which must be understood and embraced in particularly prescribed ways). With their loaded

Shakespearean and multiple Steinian connotations, the coupling of these two famous lines in particular challenges the arbitrary assignation of value and the determination of uncrossable boundaries involved in acts of naming and in matters of family, tribe, and race. They also redraw our attention to the normally elided material existence and feel of the word itself.

Another significant element of Shakespearean sediment in Stein’s “rose” is also the literarily elaborated, thoroughly English play on the “red” and the “white” of the

“English rose” throughout English history and in Shakespeare’s plays on the “Wars of the

Roses.” Most relevant here (apart from the complex historiographical, historical, and political aspects of Shakespeare’s histories) is (perhaps) that Shakespeare’s take on the conflict of the “roses” of England plays up the lasting representational significance of symbols and naming (in both colors and flowers); the mythic impact of his plays underlines the lasting effects of historiographical and literary canonization, especially in the hands of the state but also in the hand of the poet. That Stein would have been sensitive to these especially English undertones related to “rose,” naming, and race (or

256 other notions of kinship and identity as significantly blood-based) is especially evident in a remark she makes in her lecture, “Plays.” In addition to commenting that growing up she “read Shakespeare’s plays a great deal” (254), she comments that in particular, she

“read and reread” Shakespeare’s “Henry the Sixth” and loved it because “there were so many little bits in it that were lively words” (“Plays” 255). It is precisely in Henry VI

Part I, where Shakespeare constructs the “Tudor Myth”305 and “invent[s] the celebrated scene. . . .where the dynastic rivals [York and Lancaster] pluck” (Hicks 16) (respectively) the “White Rose and the Red” (Richard III), touted later by Henry VII as symbolically united in a “fair conjunction” in his marriage to Elizabeth of York.

Further along (or beside, or doubling back from) this proliferative chain of variously related word constellations, we see yet another loaded clustering together of race, rose, color, cooking, and hierarchies of power in Stein’s “Didn’t Nelly and Lily

Love You”:

In San Francisco in the state of California representative antagonism had not any meaning. . . . It is the custom when there is imitation to speak the language that resembles green. It is the custom when there is tangling to color the silks the color of roses and green. It is the custom when the country is willing to leave the coloring in green and vermillion. I often wonder about pink and about rose and about green. We knew what we felt. We felt felt. Austria made felt and I felt that the ruler, do not despise a colored ruler, I felt that no one was any cruder.

How can you control weddings. . . . It was a coincidence that he moved there and that she stayed there and that they were and that he came to be there and she came not to be fair, she was darker than another, how can a sky be pale and how can a

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 305 I am not familiar enough with this history to comment on the historiographical or literary contexts and repercussions of the conflicts or Shakespeare’s plays. I glean from Michael Hicks that “the Tudor Myth” is one way to refer to at least the version of the story that “is the theme of Shakespeare’s eight history plays set in the period from 1398 to 1485” (15). Both Hicks and other historians seem to agree that Shakespeare’s rendering of the events became the “most familiar” (Hicks 16) legacy and most circulated version of the stories in England.

257 lily be so common that it makes a hedge. . . . Cyclamen categorically expresses reddening and re-reddening. . . . .

Creoles are difficult to placate. How many kinds of Creoles are there. . . .they do not believe in repetition. I repeat that nearly everything is eaten cooked. Except salad. . . . Are you willing to remember that a cousin is in relation has relation to resemblance and restoration. I restore this to you. When you are through are you a Jew. . . . And what does nobility do. (“Didn’t Nelly and Lily Love You” 1922)

There is too much open suggestion here to even begin to discuss in depth. Briefly put, the excerpt at the very least displays Stein’s freely intertwining compositional meshing of: her own history and a whole host of racial anxieties involving mixing, “representative antagonism,” “imitation,” “language that resembles,” “the color of roses,” the question of whether one is “pale” and “fair” or “darker then another, the desire to “control weddings,” ideas regarding civilization and what “is eaten cooked,” and the notion that

“Creoles are difficult to placate.” All this is accompanied by the playful nudge to the reader to follow the differently readable, suggestive resonances of the slanted text: “Are you willing to remember that a cousin is in relation has relation to resemblance and restoration.”

Additionally enhancing the racial tones so variously animating Stein’s “roses,” the prominent legacy of Darwin in Stein’s generation, widespread popular naturalism, and Victorian gardening crazes in Europe and the U.S., particularly among the

“cultivated” classes, directly placed Stein’s adopted “rose” at the convergence of imperial, scientific, and racial discourses obsessed with reproductive mixing and species development. Danielle Price has noted, in her discussion of Francis Hodgson Burnett’s popular book, The Secret Garden (1911), that the early twentieth century was a “time when interest in gardens reached a frenzy” (4). (She is focusing specifically on England

258 here, but numerous other sources show that the flower frenzy was common elsewhere in

Europe and across the U.S. among certain classes.) The story, in which a sickly, spoiled, distinctly “yellow” Mary Lennox (who is “yellow” specifically “because she had been born in India” (Price 8) notwithstanding her English parentage) succinctly illustrates the racist imperial narrative regarding the inferiority and threatening taint of the colonies, the innate superiority of white Englishness, and the need for the “cultivation” of proper subjects, themes not new in the English literary tradition. Hodgson’s story vividly draws upon and unites the “Victorian love affair with flowers” (4), the construction of the white woman’s proper role as linked to the ornamental delicacy of flowers (5), and the notion

England’s racial wholesomeness and the superiority of “English soil” (8). As Price points out, the book reflects the period’s saturation in both racializing naturalist interests and the intensely propagandized and naturalized racial projects of Empire, according to which the potentially unruly “nature” of both women and colonized subjects had to be properly disciplined and cultivated, as meticulously ordered and cared for as the ideal garden. Additionally, in keeping with the racialization of the Aesthetic (as discussed by

David Lloyd, for instance) and notions of the “representative” human subject, the capacity to keep and appreciate gardens was touted by Victorian writers as a “sign of the innate human desire for beauty” and as something that “united English people of all classes” (8).

Though it might appear to some that Stein decisively reverted to more conventionally representational writing after the Autobiography and other narrative and expository pieces of the thirties and forties, her insistently oblique and singular use of

259 language is evident in the later work as well. In her “children’s” story that is not a children’s story, The World is Round (1939), for instance we find very playful, strategic, and “cunning” uses of her “rose” line that promote her master-status as a writer.

Reflections of Stein stand out in the character “Rose,” who earnestly and somewhat tormentedly carves “Rose is a Rose” around a tree:

. . . . she would carve on the tree Rose is a Rose is a Rose is a Rose is a Rose until it went all the way round. . . . it excited her so. . . . It is not easy to carve a name on a tree particularly oh yes particularly if the letters are round like R and O and S and E, it is not easy. And Rose forgot the dawn forgot the rosy dawn forgot the sun forgot she was the only one and all alone there she had to carve and carve with care the corners of the Os and Rs and Ss and Es in a Rose is a Rose is a Rose is a Rose. (566)

In this passage, we see Stein’s ongoing evident appreciation for the material contours and textures of the word, as well as her characteristic self-promotion and an assertion of her own literary standing with and distinction from England’s “Willie.” We read that Rose specifically thinks to “cut Rose is a Rose is a Rose,” to “cut it higher” and “cut it there” with “her knife” and can sense an emphasis on Stein’s own “cutting” and revising of an

Anglo-male dominated tradition.306 Stein also seems to implicitly (and openly,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 306 Stein draws out the problematic of representation and naming elaborately (a part of her lifelong preoccupation with identity and difference and her textual explorations of the both desperately abysmal and enjoyably productive difference at the heart of language) in “The Autobiography of Rose” and The World is Round, in which Rose repeatedly asks whether she would still be Rose “if her name had not been Rose” (The World is Round 537). Rose’s earnestness regarding the question often results in tears and seems importantly tied to the fact that she is “a little girl.” The felt weight of the gender distinction is clearly at work in Stein’s own relating to Shakespeare (and her male-writer contemporaries), who is evoked in the name of the character “Willie” who is introduced as Rose’s cousin. Not that Rose stands for Stein in any direct way, but there is a suggestive identification between the character of Rose and Stein throughout this fascinating “children’s” story. Stein’s repeated questioning of her own identity elsewhere in numerous ways (including in variations of the recurring line “I am I because my little dog knows me”), for instance, seems echoed in Rose’s question. And there is of course Rose’s own inscribing of “A Rose is A Rose…” Unlike Rose, “Willie” sings confidently: “Willie was not like his cousin Rose singing did not make him cry it just made him more and more excited” (541). He knows “Willie is Willie” (539) and also happens to sing: “Bring me bread/ Bring me butter/ Bring me cheese” (545).

260 determinedly, and strategically) inscribe herself into the tradition, introducing the female

“cut” here, all while incorporating the typically Shakespearean element of essential and productive misrecognition and misreading (Mme Roux again): Willie, or later “Will,” is initially introduced in the story as Rose’s cousin, but there are intimations of the threat of deviant, incestuous relations when Rose, after “cutting” her own name repeatedly, sees on another tree the names “Rose” and “Willie and “under Willie,” “Billie”; in the end, we read that “Willie and Rose turned out not to be cousins. . . . and so they married and had children and sang with them. . . . and they lived happily ever after”! For Stein, the important literary-creative “marrying” of “Will” and Rose/Stein is significantly fruitful and (re)productive for new lively “singing.”

Significantly relevant to and illustrative of Stein’s singular handling of language, the transformation of “cousin Will” in The World is Round into an altogether different relation brings to mind Stein’s various uses of “cousin” as suggestive of a textual mode of side-stepping straightforward representation for different kinds of relating with and in language. We have already seen “cousin” in the opening of Tender Buttons. And the recurrence above in “Didn’t Nelly and Lily Love You” reminds the reader “to remember that a cousin is in relation has relation to resemblance and restoration”; the appearance of the word constitutes an insistence on the innovative aspects of Stein’s compositional practice as a kind of “relation” to reality that differs from modes of representational

“resemblance.” Elsewhere (textual moments elsewhere in Stein always seem to be

“sewn” to whatever this here we are reading—“el-sew-here”), in “Emp Lace,” for instance, we read: “Leave a glass mass leave a glass mass curling is a pressed sense./

261 Words cousin by words and cousin by, words and cousin and by words and cousin and by words and cousin by” (“Emp Lace” 161). In “Natural Phenomena” we find the telling

“Cousins mean” (187). Stein uses the notion of indeterminately kin “cousins” as a way of arranging and using words to “mean” through being beside (“by”) and relating otherwise rather than simply standing in for, by means of a more indefinitely and variously felt “pressed sense” rather than the abstractly posited “presence” of representation.

Lorna Smedman’s article on Stein touches on Stein’s non-linear and somewhat anti-representational relating of words as “cousins.” In particular, drawing our attention to the knotted intersections of Stein’s refusals of representational logic and her use of representationally reductive “racialized language,” Smedman addresses the line “A cousin to cooning, a cousin to that and mixed labor” from Stein’s “White Wines.”

Smedman argues that Stein’s “use of racialized language is best understood in the context of her focus on difference and relation in the arenas of semantics and syntax” (570). She suggests that “[i]f [Stein] was drawn to racialized terms and references again and again, it was because, unlike many others, these signifiers could not be separated from what they signified” (570) and thus posed a most engaging “challenge” for Stein to attack.

Smedman suggests that Stein may have been exploiting the potential “‘transgressive’ mileage” she could get in the use of such “‘unladylike’ language” (Smedman 584), and ultimately concludes that though she failed to detach these words from their rigidly ossified signifying functions, she was probably “attempting in a variety of ways to defuse this language, to disempower it” (585).

262 As much as I appreciate Smedman’s grappling with the problem of race in notably oblique Stein piece here, I find various aspects of her reasoning problematic.

While the challenging representational aspects of such words may have interested Stein, and though her use of them probably did have something to do with a sense of risqué

“unladylike” transgression, it does not necessarily follow that she had progressive or antiracist intentions to “defuse” or “disempower” the racism of the names and epithets she so frequently used. In the numerous appearances of “nigger,” “black head,” “coon,”

“Negress,” “chinamen” and “hindoo chinaman” in Stein’s corpus that I have noticed, it seems to me that, as with her use of other historically charged and colored words, Stein shakes up the representational functions of words without cutting them off from but rather using their layered historical muddiness. We have seen in all Stein’s compositional practices above that she doesn’t sterilize words into sense-less abstract material or extract them from their historical context but rather re-enlivens them through innovative arrangement, playful permutations, and creative exploitation of all everyday, literary, personal, historical, visceral, and sensual elements. Given the additional fact of the consistently lighthearted, white-racialist and paternalist tones of so many of the passages in which these words occur, and the key ways they serve as racial/colored contrast to a broader, Jewish-inclusive whiteness Stein often seems to embrace, any genuinely progressive intention to defuse the racist impact of the words seems unlikely.

Like the many other racial epithets in Stein’s writing, the distinctly charged and jarring valences of words like “coon” in her work seem simply (in the grain of her epoch’s racism and racialist perspectives) exploited for the purposes of primarily white

263 compositional enjoyment and personal pleasure. It seems overly generous on Smedman’s part to extend Stein’s transgressive and anti-normative contributions in other areas into projected progressive attempts with regard to race.307 Even if Stein may have viewed such moments in her writing as antipatriarchal, “unladylike” or excitingly

“transgressive,” the notion that using such viciously racist epithets (the violence of which

Smedman seems to whiten and neutralize by calling them “racialized terms” and

“racialized signifiers”) for such textually-serving purposes might be acceptable coming from Stein’s distinctly non-black subject position would seem itself to indicate an already racist perspective and context on Stein’s part. As a broad reading of her writing shows, while Stein clearly challenged patriarchal and logocentric norms and certain more restrictive Anglo-Saxonist and Nordic-favoring constructions of Euro- and Euro-

American whiteness, it also seems evident that she embraced a broader and “different whiteness” (“ROOMS,” Tender Buttons) that included Jews at the expense of representationally used and abused black and yellow bodies and names.

Smedman’s readings importantly confront rather than sidestep the problem of race and racial epithets in Stein’s writing. Ultimately, however, Smedman seems to project

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 307 Smedman seems to suggest in her article that the potentially primary “aesthetic” motivations for using such words are “difficult to separate” but possibly separable from “the political and social realities of racism,” or somehow justifiable (in the hands of white writer) (572). She also problematically seems to suggest that the fact that “needless are niggers” in Tender Buttons can be read in multiple ways (and not solely in the sense of “‘we’ whites don’t need ‘niggers’” (572)) implies that the line is potentially sufficiently free of racist motivation—as if differently racist or racialist inflections and dynamics were not at work in the passage. And she reads the line at the end of the “DINNER” passage, “All to be not a white old chat churner” problematically as an “unambiguous refusal of whiteness” (573). I would argue, rather that while Stein may have refused a certain brand of “old white,” male, Anglo-Saxon or Nordic whiteness, she seems to embrace a more expansive but still exclusionary “different whiteness” that can fold in erstwhile marginal European “ethnics” while remaining strategically and ontologically distinguishable from the darkly “colored” world.

264 racially-progressive motives onto Stein while attributing the racist impact of words like

“cooning” and “nigger” primarily to the historical weight of the words themselves, as if

Stein in all her uses of these words were earnestly attempting to overcome and diffuse (or defuse) their racist tones. I would argue that given the ways in which such words function compositionally, as part of a seriously playful use of words rather than any politically progressive yet failing project, Stein simply embraced and employed them as more “colorful” and interestingly provocative raw material. Some of Daylanne English’s insights regarding Stein’s writing strike me as more likely and accurate. English states that while “many of Stein’s formal innovations do disrupt received notions of the literary, even of the modern,” and though Stein undoubtedly differed from other male modernists in her “concern for modern women and their material conditions,” her “formal radicalism does not always or necessarily translate into social or political radicalism” (97, 98).

Though to a great extent Stein worked against the most conventional or automatic force in words, in other ways she also simply used names, words, and associations in a spirit that seemed to take for granted their matter-of-factly given and common-sense connotations as unproblematic. Whatever her intent or aims may have been in repeatedly incorporating racist epithets and racist rhymes in her work (such as “Nigger nigger never die black face and china eye” in “As Fine as Melanctha”), whatever aesthetically or compositionally transgressive purpose Stein might have had, the fact is that she apparently had no qualms about scattering such intrinsically violent words and phrases throughout her writing, and in the most lighthearted contexts and gay rhythms. As we have seen, such words were both compositionally strategic (for a writer aiming to enliven

265 language and write provocatively) and personally beneficial (for a marginally or newly white Jewish American). The textual richness and dynamism evident in the reciprocally enlivening movement among numerous pet words—such as “butter,” “bread,” “read,”

“red,” “rose,” “race,” “trac(k)” and “trace”—and the offensive race names in Stein’s writings (all further contextualized, though not definitively decoded, by her more confessional and straightforwardly autobiographical moments) demonstrate that words like “chinamen,” “yellow,” “Negro,” and “nigger” worked as more compositionally useful and provocative color, intriguing insofar as they were associated with charming and exotic raced bodies. Such language worked well (as such) in evocative new word- arrangements that for the most part embraced and exploited conventionally racist resonances (rather than serving as material, the racist ontological and social resonances of which were meant to be deconstructed. And regardless of either progressive or racist intent on Stein’s part (and besides, the history and current state of the U.S. show that

“progressive” and racist are not mutually exclusive terms), it is obvious that just as Stein cunningly used “Rose is a rose…” to promote her literary-genius standing, she put to her service all the compositional and personal racial benefits enacted in statements such as “a

Negro is a Negro” (Everybody’s Autobiography).

Throughout the pieces discussed above there are intimations of distinctly racial interest, a pervasive atmosphere of race, and a loosely sewn racial narrative that could be read as culminating, in some sense, in The World is Round. Just as Stein elsewhere intimates identification with a wholesome Euro-American racial and literary heritage through suggested ties to the rugged American whiteness of Walt Whitman and the

266 refined American whiteness of Henry James, in Rose’s ultimate marriage to “cousin”

Will, Stein appears to be writing and wedding herself into the white Anglo-American literary lineage through the exemplary figure of Shakespeare. As innovative, singular, and different as Rose/Stein might be in her cutting, “round,” and resistant writing, she ultimately seems to recognize (or at least give a nod to) legitimate cultural authority and integrity in such racial-literary traditions. Clearly emphasizing cultural, kin-like, and writerly closeness to Shakespeare, Stein aligns herself with those who would be considered marriable and amalgamable into the most refined circles of Anglo-American whiteness.

267 Epilogue/After-words

Pain soup, suppose it is a question, suppose it is butter, real is, real is only, only excreate, only excreate a no since. Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

Reversion makes revision stronger. And in combination, combine mistakes with mistaken. . . . Dividing, division, rapidity, encroaching, to transmit and to reverse. Reversibly speaking. . . . To withdraw and to amass, to add and to vary, to interline, to obviate and to ferry, to ferry across the weight of there there need be no vagueness as to hair. If the hair is cut, what, cut, if the air is cut, and to say it with flowers, not too rapidly and outstanding. An outstanding obligation. Please and pleases. Gertrude Stein,“Subject-Cases: The Background of a Detective Story”

Let us begin with their not singing. I wonder about song. . . . Did Rose say that she meant to diffuse to diffuse hope and reluctantly retain kindness. . . . Did Rose say did Rose say anyway you pray. Did Rose say anyway I pray to-day, did Rose say that anyway she would slowly betray, what her bowl. I know what I mean by reeking. And now eyes and arise. And in the way of separation ties./ In this way American glory in this way I say American glory does not fade away. Gertrude Stein, “Why Are There Whites to Console”

It may seem that many of my readings of Stein are accusatory or damning, but in my insistence on following the racializing logic embedded in Stein’s idiomatic diction and compositional-textual play, various personal identifications, and authorial/imperial postures, I am continually appreciative of her singular innovations and compositions as a woman and poet; at the same time, I feel that it is important to consider how her poetically playful work (all the pieces that I find most enjoyable across and outside of generic categories) sounds-out or speaks to broader ontological, aesthetic, aesthetic- ontological questions which clearly concerned her, and which are profoundly (though perhaps inexplicably) tied to the question of race. If time would permit, I would (and

268 hope in the future to) follow the windings and re-soundings of race further throughout

Stein’s corpus, all the interminable lines of “cousins” and “sisters” and “weddings” and traces and tracks of bodily-being and intimations of the racial in the explorations of nonsense and interstices of sense in her other pieces. I would, of course, also consider

(and regret not having the time to adequately address here) Stein’s re-figured legacy in the creative work of Harryette Mullen, Monique Truong, and others who have responded to and reworked race in Stein. And I am especially interested in the resonances and significance of Stein’s poetics in the work of other contemporary “minority” (specifically non-white, and primarily, though not exclusively, female) writers and poets of the avant- garde, including Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Myung Mi Kim, and Sangxing Wang, for instance.

For now, I attempt to give some tentative closure to, or rather, set up a necessary break in, my ongoing reading of Stein’s work, which continues to call and engage.

Although Stein picks up and colludes with her period’s figuring of race as a concrete fact of color difference, we find that her use of language and soundings of being, body, and difference may also work to shed light on the unexpected and often muted and disavowed locations and pervasive irruptions of race and racial power as unfixable, non-apparent, deeply meaningful, untraceably (and profoundly) shaping, and consequential “area[s] of act.” Stein’s word- and sound-plays manifest race not (merely) as color or isolated instantiations of imagined difference that can be dissolved but rather, or further, as a necessary structural element in the framework of all meaning-making and being-defining, as a part of the ontoepistemological self-differentiating moment of language and the

269 disavowal of the material, fleshly Other in representational logic and forms. Her insistently oblique, artful, and playful uses of language call attention to the essential and essentially Other Real of the elusive trace, the “interline,” the non-abstractable, incommunicable, singularly-felt-universal, concrete as “hair” yet ungraspable as “air,” body-hugging, mind-teasing, life-sourcing realm of things that matter beside and outside our capacities to say or conceive but in terms “as clear as mud”—where race always emerges as the utter base, the unutterable, the ever-outside, always elsewhere, the

“merely” imagined nowhere, and we know-[exactly]-where family-feeling, spirit connection and “separation ties” of “no-bodies” (Silva), where the “air is [thick enough to] cut” in the endlessly repeated, originary violence and inhumanity of coming into

“civilized” “humanity.”

Reading Stein without blocking out, bracketing, or attempting to mitigate the racist and racializing moments in her work opens up whole fields of soundings and being- in-language that are otherwise imperceivable or inaccessible, and paradoxically, reading race in “Steinese,” with the grain of her work, could perhaps both reflect a common-sense racism on her part and contribute to elucidating the most progressive acts and implications of her writing. Stein’s workings of “butter” in so much of her writing, for instance, might be read as leading us back to (“[r]eversion makes revision stronger”) the ontological moment of Being’s disavowal and subjugation of the body and materiality

(Silva and Moten), where race irrupts with and perhaps as the unrecoverable, unrepresentable trace. In the insistence of butter and all its permutations, Stein not only overtly celebrates the soft, messy, flavorful and incommunicable realms of utterly

270 phenomenological and embodied being, she also implicitly identifies the (arguably) most important areas and exalted experiences of being—loving especially, but also creative making, thoughtful writing, and artistic sounding—with not just embodiment or sensuality but also with what is universally taken to be the basest, utterly othered and most pervasively real detritus of life—the excremental. As Kay Turner has suggested in her compilation Baby Precious Always Shines, Stein’s celebratory elevation of the bodily and sensual could be read as culminating in the identification of love (in life with Alice), the loved one, and the most important of work (writing—for Stein—as enabled by such love) with the scatalogical.

Though she, like many Stein readers, focuses on the feminist, lesbian, and queer progressive significance in some of Stein’s personal writings at the exclusion and occlusion of the racial, Kay Turner’s collection of and comments on the everyday love- notes passed between Stein and Toklas (unintentionally handed over by Toklas with other work sent off to the Yale Collection) gesture toward the qualities and acts of Stein’s writing that highlight her (contradictory but limitedly progressive) engagement with the racial in her texts. Turner points out that Stein’s ubiquitous use of cow, commonly read as code for the orgasmic, seems also (or rather) to suggest the defecatory “brown cow” or

“cow patty” (common euphemistic terms in Stein’s time, Turner notes)–especially when read in light of the very telling contexts and intimate indications of concern over Toklas’s

“regularity” (and bodily rhythms and “movements” in this other sense) mentioned throughout Stein’s informal love notes to Toklas. This assemblage of notes does seem to illustrate the possible scatological inflections of Stein’s uses of “cow”—which would not

271 necessarily be precluded by any potential erotic resonances. (Stein singularly highlights the body (like the word), as source of pleasure and pain, erotic loveliness and mess, possibility and limitation, reflecting the pleasure-and-“anguish” in “English” and language.)308

In a few of these notes—we see that this other “cow” also alternatively sounds

“butter” not merely in the obvious dairy association but also in the backward, “bottom” reference to “butt her” (and/or “her butt”—Stein comments at least once on the cuteness of ABT’s “bottom”)—where we might follow the chain from “butter” to “oil” and then to

“soil” in its multiple senses (which of course could also be playfully derived from the frequent uses of “bed” and “sow”). In this light, as Turner notes, the most beloved being

(Alice), (and I would add—the most cherished and irreplaceable flavors, substances, and words, such as “butter” and “rose”), and the all-important “genius” compositional work enabled by such love importantly inhabit “the place of excrement.” It is this sort of textual work in Stein—her differently sounded and sounding elevation of the bodily, the muddy, the base, and even the excremental materiality of human being, of all the putative baseness that grounds, manifests, and indispensably articulates being—that constitutes a significant, though indirect, challenge to the racial regime that emerges with the emergence of modern, rational man. Stein locates Life in that which is purportedly devoid of self-determining life, intelligence, and the highest heights of creativity, thereby displacing (or at least gesturing towards potentially revisionary attitude toward) the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 308 As mentioned in Chapter Three, we find the following lines in “Emp Lace” (1914): English or please english. . . . Anguish anguish anguish./ Puzzle a tower./ Real button./ Real butter or nuts./ Real button nuts. . . . / Weeding butter.

272 modern subjugation of materiality and co-articulation of race as the always-outside trace.

The sorts of “mansions,” “intellectual recreation,” or pleasures that one might find in

Stein’s work are, it turns out, only articulable in and through the thoroughly (utterly and butterly) bodily, messy, and earthly.

In certain important ways, Stein’s writing does have significant, concrete antiauthoritarian and anti-normative impulses that continue to make her work important, in the making of space for the unmastered, incoherent, incommensurable singularities that modernity and modern representational and political regimes make no room for and are set on controlling. Her sidestepping and transformation of patriarchal and logocentric drives that use language as self-effacing, abstracting representational form actually indirectly result in the possibility of seeing and hearing race elsewhere, differently and otherwise, in the non-self-identical, non-referential, materially suggestive traces of words. In all the criss-crossing, straying, and connective threads of meaning and sounding, Stein’s densely suggestive lines from Tender Buttons are significantly relevant:

“Pain soup, suppose it is a question, suppose it is butter, real is, real is only, only excreate, only excreate a no since” (“FOOD”: “ORANGE IN”). Here the rich, substantive “real” of “bread and butter”309 are at the heart of creating that is inseparable from fleshly excreting and the racial logic of textual-ontological excluding. In such a space the writer can “excreate a no since”—a “no sense,” or a “new sense” or “new scents,” as Dana Cairns Watson and other critics have noted—and perhaps recuperate the excised and demeaned realm of unordered “nonsense.” Stein returns “song” and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 309 We can read “Pain” above as the French “pain”—bread—as Chessman has observantly commented.

273 “singing” to the body, to the historically debased female body in particular, where modernity has also mapped racial otherness as inextricably tied to the material and unfree. Stein’s writing repeatedly intimates the complex vitality of the seemingly senseless enspirited-soundings that “make poetry” and that everywhere show that “Your ass is in what you sing” (Moten).310

There are no clear answers or definitive conclusions on race or racism in Stein’s work, but there are everywhere lingering questions, irruptions, and intimations of difficulty (not merely interpretive or epistemological but also ontological and ethical), and perhaps even “diffuse hope.” Where Stein’s profoundly seeing (or knowingly feeling), necessary blindness seems most paradoxically cutting and split, so potentially

“aware” though possibly, necessarily, haplessly unaware is in her questioning statement of a piece, “Why Are There Whites to Console” (1922). (The question of the title is more than and other than a question in a sense, insofar as she had to have the intimations of an answer in order to pose these words in this arrangement at the head of and throughout the particular piece they entitle.) She “wonder[s] about singing” here, just as her singing makes us wonder everywhere just what she might have meant, if anything in particular, and just how much of what is so starkly sounded in her writing informed her authorly intent—for those of us unable to bracket questions of the ethical in poetry and pleasure.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 310 Moten makes this statement in In the Break while discussing the “irreducible phonic substance” and “insistent reproductive materiality” as the space where “universality lies”: “Here lies universality: in this break, this cut, this rupture. Song cutting speech. Scream cutting song. Frenzy cutting scream with silence, movement, gesture. The West is an insane asylum, a conscious and premeditated receptacle of black magic. Every disappearance is a recording. That’s what resurrection is. Insurrection. Scat black magic, but to scat or scatter is not to admit formlessness. The aftersound is more than a bridge. It ruptures interpretation even as the trauma it records disappears…..It was always the whole body that emitted sound: instrument and fingers, bend. Your ass is in what you sing.” (39)

274 So we wonder… muse that she must have known or perhaps felt that there are “Whites to

Console” to begin with, the something to wonder “Why” about. As with so many of the

“little” pieces of her writings, this particular piece and its pieces resound throughout the entire corpus of her writing as a formulation or question that is key in her practice of

“composition.”

This provocative piece speaks, sounds, asks, and suggests the palpably felt being of race as a grounding and resounding “air,” and the element of whiteness, white privilege, and the weight (as in importance and burden) of white status everywhere in and around Stein’s writing and world, and it may help us [me] to break from this discussion without an answer, in the form of an ongoing question. Though it may be redundant, perhaps it might be meaningfully repetitive to recall the early passage from above with other irreducible, perhaps inexplicable, but still indeterminately telling portions of the text—“Why Are There Whites to Console”:

A conversation between whites. . . . Did she send./ Did she send./ Whites and whites./ Why were there whites to condole to console. Why were there whites to console to condole. Why were there whites to condole to console to console to condole. Why were there whites to console to condole to condole to console. Why were there whites to condole to console to condole to console to condole. Why were there whites to console to condole. Why were there whites to condole. Why were there whites to console. (200)

The wealth of ambiguous suggestiveness here and throughout leaves plenty for later discussion. While the question/problem/puzzle of “Whites to Console” is

275 characteristically humorous and playful—“Let us begin with their not singing”—it is simultaneously probing and serious: “I wonder about song.” And it invokes the question of something Stein celebrated seriously, lovingly fed on, and voiced publicly, “American glory” (as well as general Western-Euro imperial, national, literary and civilizational

“glory”—as she suggests in Paris, France and elsewhere), which had to come across [as recognizably white] in her peculiar “singing” in “this way.”

“Why Are There Whites to Console” strikes me as perhaps the most ambivalent of Stein’s race-sounding singing, with its intimations of what comes across as a conflicted awareness of the profound problematicity and intrinsic structural, imperial violence and proprietary-grammatical articulations of whiteness. Stein almost seems to confess an awareness of the burdensome, supremely concrete yet in some ways unquantifiable and insistently denied reality of “whiteness as property” (Cheryl Harris’s terms) in the U.S. and the Imperial West.311 In what may be a potential, tentative

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 311 Other potentially critical acknowledgements of the bloody, land-overtaking, naming-undertaking imperial and gendered violence that engenders the unbearable guilt of “whites to console” are prevalent in the text: “Did he claim did he claim. I said when she said restoration I said I wanted the rest without the oration./ Did he claim them, did he claim that the third man was on horseback and rode down too far. Did he feel that about women and children. . . .Do be civil to her” (198); How can a narrative relate inches to inches and birds to veils and voices to carpets. How can a narrative relate Friday to Friday and plains to plains and saving to saving. How can a narrative relate pillows to pillows and white to white and buttons to buttons. How can a narrative relate sacks to sacks and ease to ease and meeting to meeting. How can a narrative relate recent attention./ I will trade you” (203); They came and saw. . . ./ No account would be one where, on no account would there not be one who was one who won and was winning. Won and was winning. Was winning and won. (206–7); I feel that a home is enough./ And where do I go when I go away. Do you ask me to color everything in that white way./ Of course I will not stay away. Of course I will not go away. Of course I mean to color more white in that way. Of course I do./ Does moving make miles more. How many more miles are there before there are the miles that we said furnished the landscape./ Did you ever hear me say I wished it for water and not water and winter and not winter. Did you ever hear me say that beauty is not beauty and that I do not fulfill fully. What do you fulfill. I fulfill my wishes and their wishes./ In this way we have separated moisture./ And in the eyes./ Who has eyes./ And in the eyes./ Their eyes. / And in their eyes./ To be in the eyes./ To be in eyes./ She he and it and they said./ Led./ Eyes do not lead./ Eyes do not lead./ Her eyes have been fastened ahead./ And why can you convince me./ I cannot say all there is to say. (214)

276 distancing from “whites” to a certain extent, Stein might be suggesting the unsayable— that she and others benefiting from the privileges and pleasures of a bloodily-“won” and maintained master-mistress-subject-position knowingly silence and swallow the

(dehumanized and insistently compositionally “colored”) human cost of their grammatically instituted and effaced privilege. But such an avowal seems unspeakable, and if it is uttered, it must necessarily be accompanied by rapid disavowal of guilt:

And in this way they apparently led the way. . . ./ There are no whites to console./ There are no whites to console. / There are no whites to console to console./ There are no whites to console. . . ./ . . . .Depend on me./ I depend upon you to do what there is to do./ And serving./ And deserving./ And accept my salutation. I salute you and I say I am not displeased I am not pleased, I am not pleased I am not displeased I am not I am not able to regain frontiers. In this way a particle of the way has the necessary attendance and they stay and what do they mean by confidence. To have confidence means that importance their importance the importance of it is not denied. . . ./ . . . . We feel that it is our gift./ We feel that it is our gift. (215)

Why are there no whites to console./ To condole and to console. Who knows the difference./ She was the white rose and she was a pioneer. Can a pioneer see here./ She was a white rose and she was a pioneer and they went there with a chair./ . . . . we do go from door to door, from the door of one room to the room, from door to door and before, before this they gave this as an instance. Instead of marrying, she was married again, instead of marrying it was understood. We understand that she chose. (216)

Whether it is a matter of Stein’s identifying with and/or critiquing the “white rose” and

“pioneer” that that we “see [hear] here,” there is a sense of the crucial gravity of such matters in her own conflicted and problematic resounding/race-sounding even if insistently undecided and unclear—vague but “clear as mud” race-resonant matter which, along with gender and sexuality, seems crucial to the non-male, queer, would-be

“pioneer” who desires something “instead of marrying.”

277 It is possible that I misread Stein’s sensing of any troubling ethical implications of

“whites to console” here. She might be implying, for instance (or alternatively—hopes to appear to imply?), that there may be “whites to console” due simply to the (purportedly noble) “burden” of putatively superior civilization attributed to whites by Kipling and company, or the weight of the “gift” it is their responsibility to “share”—in which case it is the astounding blindness or duped-ness that might render them needy of consoling, or condoling. Then again, there might still be an irrepressible, or repressed and unwittingly emergent (and buried) urge to request “pardon” and a hint that despite (so many) utterances to the contrary, Stein might “really” identify with the “girl” who is “colored.”

In the text we also find:

Pardon me, A narrative./ . . . . I was thoughtful when there was no necessity for shadows. I very easily meant to be a girl and I scarcely measured why I was colored. How were you colored. . . . Napkins are used at table by hosts guests and servants. I almost suddenly thought out places for cups. Cups may be religious… out of all the whole wide world they chose me. Choose me and say that you can call a colonel a general if he advances further. (204)

If nothing else, it seems Stein may have had a necessarily muddled awareness of the power and pleasure at stake in what one has “meant” and “how” one is “colored”—of the differentials of power implicit in mere naming, in what one is “call[ed]” and who plays the caller of “color” to define “hosts guests and servants.”

Stein differently sounds, occludes, and sews her “Songstresses secrets” (“One

Sentence” 97) here, as elsewhere (“sew here”) in her work, re-sounding and race- sounding again with ordinary words such as “hair,” “share,” “care,” “marry” and “carry” and their unexpected ties to racial-reproductive textually-miscegenative strains

278 converging into “miscarry” at the close of “Whites to Console” and leading back to the pervasive race-anxiety of who will “marry” and “carry”:

Why have you disclosed and as to repose when do you expose repose. . . .and why do you share why do you share your hair. My hair your hair, you share I share we share you share they share we share we share hair, and they care do they care when they care do they wear what they wear do they care why they care do they marry do they carry, do they do they do they do they mean to realise markets and money, do they, do they mean to be funny do they mean to be funny and do they measure there what do they measure and where. Many many tickle you for sin. So can religions miscarry. (218)312

Here again we sense the uncontainably productive and surprisingly profound cut of

Stein’s sounding in the ways, words, and traces through which potentially invisible workings of race and racial power inhabit the singularly meaningful, self-differing divisibility of language, of words and sounds that can be used, misused, and abused and made to miscarry by power and “religions,” the same words that otherwise “share,”

“care,” “carry,” “tickle” and lovingly “mean.”

At the end of “Whites to Console” (as in the last words actually uttered by Stein according to herstory), the final stress falls on the question that constitutes the title and piece itself. In the ambiguities and paradoxes of “Why Are There Whites to Console” we possibly sense what Stein might have felt everywhere, with or without being aware—of the pressures and pleasures of racial power; of the divisible and varied uses of obscurity—of our own malleability and divisibility as [often simultaneously] those

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 312 In the “marry” and “carry” in this passage there are clear intertextual ties to Stein’s short piece “Dolphin.” We can sense the loaded “songstresses” and violent “secrets” of the unprovable but again clearly sounded, reinforced ties to the putatively innocent, childhood-reminiscent singing and more explicitly race-power raising tones of such lines as “Chinaman chinese chinaman chinese, Chimes and chinaman carry, they marry too” (“Dolphin”), or “Nigger nigger never die black face and china eye” (“As Fine As Melanctha”), which one can always claim simply “mean to be funny.”

279 attempting to challenge the perversions of oppressive power and those who would, or could [and invariably do] abuse it—especially before the relentlessly rich and excessively pleasureful insistence of butter (or teas, or raisin- or rice-cake) or body or rose. However racist Stein’s writing may or may not be, it seems important to read Stein, and not just because we all feel and fall on both the creative and destructive handlings of pleasure and power, its sweetness and its hemming in. Stein’s meaningfully muddy, cloudy, and thickly (racially) enclouded work may be damnably racist and unjustifiably exploitative, but it also somehow seems to gesture toward the potentially redemptive indeterminacy and necessity of excess and nonsense—the question, the questionable and the questioning. If unwittingly, Stein’s writing singularly articulates the questioning everywhere yoked to and evoked by the elusive trace and incommunicable family-feeling of race or “tribe.” Here questioning necessarily invites the communal unboundedness of

Being and being, the unsayable of consoling and condoling of “whites” always with their utter (udder) Other. Stein’s ongoing importance and notable singularity perhaps have something to do with the fact that her writing seems to help us to sense and feel the potentially creative, instructive elements in the ever-present, extra-sense irruptions and questionings of the affectionate, uneasy, and real traces/tracking of race that she sounds out in such passages as “why do you share your hair. My hair your hair, you share I share we share you share they share we share we share hair, and they care do they care. . .

. do they do they do they do they mean.”

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