Cold Soup: Coldness as Joylessness in Tender Buttons Josie Reynolds College

When thinking of a bowl of soup, you may conjure up a variety of associations. Perhaps you recall being brought a hot bowl of chicken noodle soup when sick, or having soup for dinner to warm up in the winter. In the case of Gertrude Stein’s narrator in Tender Buttons, however, soup is a dish served cold. Stein’s depiction of various foods being cold works to turn the reader’s association of food as comfortable on its head. Gertrude Stein’s fixation on cold temperatures in Tender Buttons, specifically when juxtaposed with ideas of human contact, implies that the void of loneliness cannot be filled by superficial pleasures.

In her chapter on “Food,” Gertrude Stein repeats either the word “cold” or references colder temperature, in the word “freeze,” for example. Interestingly, while food itself is supposed to nourish and provide comfort, Stein’s fixation on the coldness of foods, especially ones that we do not typically imagine as being cold, interrogates this relationship between food and comfort. In the poem “Veal,” Stein writes, “Cold soup, cold soup clear and particular and a principal a principal question to put into” (67). Soup typically serves as the epitome of a warm, comforting food, so much so that we tend to have it...