Recyclopedia

Recyclopedia - Harryette Mullen

"Trimmings"

Objects



"S*PeRM**K*T"

Foods



"Tender Revisions: Harryette Mullen’s Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T" - Deborah Mix

Relationship between Stein and Mullen; how Mullen got inspired by Stein: prose/poetry form, the woman space and domestic space/consumer space. Mullen used critiques of white femininity from Stein to make her own critiques about womanhood and consumerism in all shapes. She perpetuated and brought to life African American style of experimentalism in post-modernism and modernism. Mullen's poem "A Petticoat" is compared to the "Olympia" painting by Manet. Makes a point about showing how white femininity is superior to black femininity which hovers in the background with "bright white colors", while the white nude woman stares at the viewer. Mullen also strengthens role of ink in her poem by using flimsy adjectives to describe the white woman. She gives more concrete power to the woman made of "ink". She teases the social and literary conventions at the time. Arguments about Stein being racist despite her claims that she isn't. (she supposedly subjugates black women to white writing). But Stein through her very identity as a Jew and a lesbian makes that issue even more complicated. Mullen tries to deconstruct stereotyped and racist words. Some of her poems follow several threads denoting fusion and conflicts between white and black culture: "one thread of the poem follows traditional American signifiers", " But in another thread, jingoistic colors edge into other kinds of coloring", "And a third thread traces again the (dis)connections between black women and traditional femininity", "And a third thread traces again the (dis)connections between black women and traditional femininity." Makes an argument that Mullen is trimming away the scraps of Stein's style and content, and using the scraps of marginalization to make them central in her poems. She also uses trimming offs of history, letting complex relationships between cultures come to light. Mullen explores "contradictory pressures on women" in several of her poems; she also uses words and themes laden with contradictory connotations, making readers think on the role of feminity as a whole, not only by race. Also "Mullen provides an illustration of this conflation of violence and femininity" in poems like the pocketbook. In S*PeRM**K*T, Mullen uses material and sexual desire and pleasure and pain to show the commodity of the marketplace and the place of the woman in it. Then the article explores topics of advertising and consumer appeal: the image of consuming the 'perfect' food to become perfect; the image of the desirable white baby on products. Yet she also hints at less desirable images like goo . SHe unveils the culture's obsession with "surface order and control" while showing forces that break that control. The control is directed to people of race and women. Talks about the contradictory nature of how Western culture views sex---> commodity of women and grocery store allusion. Women need to be sanitized,men don't. Women's sexuality is focused on cleanliness and home, men's sexuality is not contained. The article also mentions the people who refuse to consume: anorexics and their marketed image in the media yet there are starving people in the world. The consumerism also alludes to white and black relations under slavery.