From selected interviews with Harryette Mullen, along with a Stein/Mullen comparision:
In Trimmings, I actually found myself at a certain point becoming alarmed, because I wanted the book to be about feminist ideas, a feminist exploration of how femininity is constructed using clothing, how the clothing itself speaks to, or is emblematic of, certain kinds of constraints on women’s bodies. That is one of the issues I wanted to deal with: the overlap at that time of pornography and fashion…. The other thing had to do with the critique by black women and other women of color of the very way that feminism was constructed around the needs of white women without always considering the sometimes very different needs of women of color who were not middle-class, or working-class white women who also had problems with academic feminism.
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Manet, Olympia (1863)
Stein’s “Petticoat”: A light white, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm.
Mullen’s response, from Trimmings (11):
A light white disgraceful sugar looks pink, wears an air, pale compared to shadow standing by. To plump recliner, naked truth lies. Behind her shadow wears her color, arms full of flowers. A rosy charm is pink. And she is ink. The mistress wears no petticoat or leaves. The other in shadow, a large, pink dress.
Reflecting on this poem–one of the more direct responses to Stein in her book–and on the project as a whole, Mullen writes:
In a way, the whole book is really built around this: both my active and my somewhat critical engagement with Stein, my problematic relation to the Western icon of beauty and the black woman’s relationship to that, and my interest in representation itself, whether it is a visual representation or a representation in language.
Elisabeth Frost, “Signifyin(g) on Stein: The Revisionist Poetics of Harryette Mullen and Leslie Scalapino” Postmodern Culture 5.3 (1995):
As in Tender Buttons as well, Mullen plays with words to release the reader’s own associative powers. There is, indeed, great pleasure for the reader in the process.
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In this way Mullen uses a Steinian linguistic play to address not just the pleasures of language and clothing, but their larger social implications, the very issues that Stein most frequently avoided. Trimmings removes Tender Buttons from its hermetically sealed locale and, so to speak, takes it out of the closet and into the street, by underlining the conjunctions between racial identity and gender in a semiotics of American culture. In choosing Stein as intertextual companion, Mullen uses what Henry Louis Gates identifies as a strategy frequently employed in African-American writing: the elaboration of repetition and difference. “Signifying,” Gates says, is the playing of various kinds of rhetorical games in black vernacular, and it can mean “to talk with great innuendo, to carp, cajole, needle, and lie,” as well as “to talk around a subject, never quite coming to the point” (Gates 54). Signifying contrasts with the “supposed transparency of normal speech”; it “turns upon the free play of language itself, upon the displacement of meanings” (53).
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Mullen has written that “Gender is a set of signs which we tend to forget are arbitrary. In these prose poems I thought about language as clothing and clothing as language”
In fact, by simultaneously inhabiting and altering Stein’s non-traditional language, Mullen encodes in Stein’s own hermetic diction the divergent perspective provided by an African-American woman. Stein’s codes must, indeed, be broken; to have social significance, linguistic “play” has to evoke aspects of a shared, social identity, and not simply constitute an idiosyncratic, private language. In part, Trimmings is indeed homage to Stein, a writer whose poetry attempts to change consciousness, and even our own relation to our bodies, through a changed language. Yet for Mullen, the experiment now appears too circumscribed. Her “signifying” on Tender Buttons lays down a challenge: women’s dress (their “distress”) constitutes a social semiotics, the “language” of a culture whose racial and sexual politics we would do well to change.