Pushing Buttons in "Susie Asado"

In describing her work in Tender Buttons, Gertrude Steins states that, "I struggled with the ridding myself of nouns, I knew nouns must go in poetry as they had gone in prose if anything that is everything was to go on meaning something. And so I went on with this exceeding struggle of knowing really knowing what a thing was really knowing it knowing anything I was seeing anything I was feeling so that its name could be something, by its name coming to be a thing in itself as it was but would not be anything just and only as a name” (242). Her quote describes her struggle with sounds to accurate describe the objects that provoke her feelings. An excellent example of Stein's struggle with nouns, sounds, meaning and feeling is with her piece "Susie Asado' (185).

In "Susie Asado," Stein initiates the piece with the repetition of "sweet" over and over again. The repetition of the word leads the reader to hear the word sound differently and to separate the sign, the concept of "sweet," from it's signifier or word. At the last repetition, Stein adds the word "tea," completing a common phrase. However, the phrase takes on a sensual and seductive tone quickly because readers connect the "sweet tea" concept to Susie Asado which follows directly after (lines 1 - 2). Just the word choice "asado" connotes seduction because of its allusion to meat. The Spanish-English Collins Dictionary describes "asado" as "roast" or "barbecue" ("asado"). Susie is then viewed as a piece of meat, a carnal attraction.

Susie Asado is the narrator's fetish and object of desire.

Stein continues to separate signifiers from their signified---rambling mismatched words that have no meaning being next to each other. The meaning of the words and what they add to the sensual tone of the poem are clear even when they are mismatched. Sensual nouns and adjectives describe the narrator's opinion of the meaty Susie “...slips slips hers. /...This is a please this is a please there are the saids to jelly. These are the / wets these day the sets to leave a crown to Incy” (lines 6 – 9).

However, “Susie Asado” is an excellent example of Stein's struggle to express meaning without the use of nouns. The most evocative words in the text are the verbs; they express the most. “Tremble,” “shade and shove and render,” “drink,” “hold,” “lean,” and “slips” all express the sensuality of Stein's “rare bit” of Susie. Stein embraces the syllables and the constraints that the English language puts into meaning, how shaped by patriarchy and its constructions each words becomes. Repetition and rambling, she shows, are the mechanisms that start the deconstruction of language's conventions. Stein attempts to break the barriers of language conventions while flaunting her personal rebellion of social-sexual constructions with her poem's homoerotic topic. In short, Stein turns up the “tenderness” and pushes the “buttons” of her readers while exploring meaning, how to express feeling and language constraints under patriarchy with her heated poems.






Works Cited

"asado" http://dictionary.reverso.net/spanish-english/asado

"Susie Asado." Tender Buttons. The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair, Eds. W. W. Norton & Co: New York, 2003. 185.