L’ecriture Feminine or the female vernacular of the Female Aesthetic movement advocated emphasis on the “female sexual morphology,” calling women writers to arms to embrace the beauty and functions of their bodies (Lee). Often in an ambiguous style, the writing of L’ecriture Feminine is about resistance to the patriarchal norms of conventional structure and stylization as well as the French feminist term jouissance: “The derived noun, jouissance, has three current meanings in French: it signifies an extreme or deep pleasure; it signifies sexual orgasm; and in law, it signifies having the right to use something, as in the phrase avoir la jouissance de quelque chose,” (Clark). Identification and acceptance of the female to her bodily functions in the context of masturbation and sex in general was something sinful to talk about or really think about for the female prior to the feminist movement and French Decadence movement in literature and art. Shifting from the phallogocentric orientation of the world to sexuality and the body allotted for the women to use her physical manifestation in writing as a playground for symbolic protest and self-evaluation.  There was an overwhelming need for change or as Irigaray states, “Need for women to recognize their jouissance to subvert phallocentric oppression.”(Jones). Feminist writers, namely French, believed that in order to trump the phallus-oriented world women needed to become one with their bodies, to love and bring them to the brink of pleasure and understanding.

In Cixous’ The Laugh of the Medusa, she advises all women on how the road to independence for women should be paved and what had to be done: “I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies — for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Women must put herself into the text — as into the world and into history — by her own movement,” (Cixous). Similar to Gertrude Stein, Cixous insists that not everything is black and white, that there is more than two sides to be taken, that there is a middle road, another color to be considered, the red that Stein continuously strings throughout her poems. Women are passionate, red in emotion, scarlet in love, while the reason obsessed, scientific man is not gray but black and white, fact or fiction; both Stein and Cixous object to the actions of men, clearly stating that women are different to an extent but should still have the same rights as men. “Listen to a woman speak at a public gathering (if she hasn’t painfully lost her wind). She doesn’t ‘speak’, she throws her trembling body forward; she lets go of herself, she flies; all of her passes into her voice, and it’s with her body that she vitally supports the ‘logic’ of her speech. Her flesh speaks true. She lays herself bare. In fact, she physically materializes what she’s thinking; she signifies it with her body. In a certain way she inscribes what she’s saying, because she doesn’t deny her drives the intractable and impassioned part they have in speaking. Her speech, even when ‘theoretical’ or political, is never simple or linear or ‘objectified’, generalized: she draws her story into history,” (Cixous).

Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons , a seemingly surrealist, if not cubist piece, at first glance appears to be a randomized stringing of senseless and unconnected words together to form an even more confusing poem, however if you tame the randomness a story of liberation and change unfolds. Stein uses puns, metaphors and symbolism to juxtapose the common views of women and her own feminist viewpoint.

A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS when compared to A TABLE is an intertwined whole. A carafe in itself is clear, but designated to hold red wine, “a single hurt color,” and is arranged to sit on a table. The wine or red is, in a sense, symbolic of the passion of women and of blood, signifying that although the emotions of women from their outside appearance might be clear, what is felt inside is contained for fear of “an arrangement in a system to pointing.” The act of pointing in itself is read as condemning, placing whatever it is that is being singled out as awkward and unacceptable, marked estranged from the dominant of society and subject to severe judgment, much as women that dared to turn to the unconventional were; Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence  is one of many examples of this feeling. The concluding line of A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS emanates a sad tone, “The difference is spreading, ” is interpreted as the negativity of the pointing is growing in size, no matter that more and more women chose to welcome their sexuality rather than abhor their bodily functions.(Stein 123).

In spite of this, A TABLE blasts power and positivity, much like the sigh and confidence of a strong army before a battle that they knew they would win, whether it was this specific fight or one of the many to follow. Stein describes the table as the epitome of stability, perhaps suggesting that change for the better would be thoroughly rejected by men because they were steady and knew their grounds in their current position and to introduce women as competition was the throw their world off its axis.  Stein also conveys that this table was more significant than than afore mentioned carafe, ” A table means more than a glass, even a looking glass is tall,” (Stein 132) in that this table had seats where everyone had their rightful place, no matter the carafe on the table and that revision to this placement would come and with it’s coming a stand would be taken and the table would shake. The shuddering of the table could tip the carafe or at least allow a spill, in which woman physically and psychologically would have escaped from oppression and be free to stand on the shaking table, altering the stakes and ultimately, break through adversity.  

 Works Cited

 

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  •  I also wrote an essay on the subject of feminism and lesbianism in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, specifically in the poems GLAZED GLITTER, A SUBSTANCE IN A CUSHION and A BOX. If anyone would like to read the essay please comment and i’ll link it.

                                                      Thanks.

                                                              -J.