Domesticating Gertrude Stein, or, “banal queerness”: reading “Lifting Belly” alongside What Happened and A Play Called Not and Now

Abstract

ABSTRACTReading Gertrude Stein’s long poem “Lifting Belly” alongside her plays What Happened and A Play Called Not and Now, this essay identifies banality and queerness as formal elements of Stein’s writing, and contends that this emerges from her persistent interest in domesticity. Despite the thematic and formal resonances between these texts, few critics read Stein’s drama and poetry together. Juxtaposing them allows me to demonstrate that, for Stein, domesticity produces a new kind of form. Repetitive, elliptical, and fragmented, these texts take their shape from Stein and Toklas’s domestic landscape, incorporating both the objects and conversations that fill it. The result is a text fundamentally shaped by the familiar rhythms and intimate spaces of everyday life, but encompassing, too, the unevenness, confusion, and uncertainty that can interrupt and invade that life. In addition to providing a new account of the role of domesticity in Stein’s experiments in literary form, this essay advances existing conversations about Stein’s queer modernism, and suggests another way of valuing Toklas’s contribution to Stein’s work: as a co-creator of domestic space.