| dc.description.abstract | While recent gender criticism has undertaken the effort to uncover important women's work, a large number of women writers remain unread or even misunderstood. This has certainly been the case with the poet Mina Loy, who was neither invited to the "dinner table" set by Judy Chicago's Dinner Party honoring great women's achievements, nor included in the Modernist canon. Those critics who have examined Loy restrict themselves to her interesting affiliations with the literary glitterati of her time, instead of seeing the whole range of her work. Her best writing was done in New York's Bowery from 1936-1953, but has been completely neglected by critics. Loy's development was in fits and starts, and she appropriated the methods of different poetics when they were convenient, like trying on hats. She was continuously recasting herself, making a fluid argument about her development difficult to impose.
The standard solution is to describe Loy's progression toward the development of a "subjectivity." This personal subjectivity was a reaction to the traditional role of "object" that women played in society. It was informed by the Modernist project, Freud, and political figures such as Margaret Sanger. As a birth control advocate, Sanger encouraged women to take control of their bodies, and in doing so, "act on" the world. Subjectivity centers the focus on the self The "I" imposes itself on the world; consciousness is exclusively personal. This eliminates the adulteration of the "self' by societal norms. It is understandable that an avant-garde woman such as Loy would embrace subjectivity. She had already "tried on the hat" of Italian Futurism and it didn't fit. However, there is ample evidence to suggest "subjectivity" was eventually rejected by Loy. It was replaced by a different view of the world which diminished the role of the subjective self Loy's life is partitioned into several stages; she moves from a typical Victorian upbringing, to a role in the Futurist movement, to becoming a twenties woman and literary renegade, to finally blossoming as a poet living in the urban wilderness of the Bowery, the slums of New York. My intention is to make the argument that her writing is not authentic until she reaches the Bowery, and she has to discard her subjective self to get there. The drastic change in Loy's world view, or paradigm shift, has its roots in Cubism and a movement called Objectivism. First, I think it is important to firmly establish Loy's discomfort with earlier roles in order to provide a basis for the more important split between a subjective self and one that is more open to what is "outside." | en |
