Chapter 4 Framing Space: The First Landscape Play

Abstract

This chapter introduces Stein’s first landscape play, Lend A Hand Or Four Religions (1922), through comparison to Tender Buttons (1912–13), another breakthrough text in which Stein explores how she might “include looking” at the world without re-admitting the mimetic basis of representation. These are related experiments in their use of painterly analogies to the figure–ground relations of landscape and still-life painting. Voris analyzes Stein’s methods in Lend A Hand for evoking a palpable spatial dimension and immanence in place of representation. In her first landscape play, the homology Stein employs is a scenic model of the co-presence of landscape and viewer. Later landscape plays differ markedly in style, revealing that Stein works at a sustained compositional problem and experiments with various possibilities in successive texts including a framed space, flux without a frame, and reversing the “places” of figure–ground.