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Mina Loy and the Myth O F the Modern Woman

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Mina Loy and the Myth O F the Modern Woman Mina Loy and the Myth of the Modern Woman Sandecp Parmar A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of London. ioo7 Department of Hnglish Language and Literature University College London UMI Number: U591B26 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U591326 Published by ProQuest LLC 2013. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Declaration I declare that this thesis, submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, is all my own work. 2 Table of Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................................4 Acknowledgements.................................................................................................................... 5 Introduction................................................................................................................................ 6 Chapter 1 - The Making of a ‘Modern Woman’ ............................................................. 30 Chapter 2 - From Modern to Mystic to Marginal: Loy Criticism from 1918 to the Present........................................................................................................................................66 1918-1970: The Public Body..................................................................................................71 1970-1996: The Feminist Body ............................................................................................. 93 1996 to the Present: The Body in Context..........................................................................100 Chapter 3 - ‘No Concrete Proof: Modern Anxiety in ‘The Child and the Parent’ and ‘Islands in the Air’ .........................................................................................................110 Chapter 4 - Racial and Religious Hybridity in ‘Goy Israels’ .................................... 143 Chapter 5 - ‘Colossus’ and the Myth of Arthur Cravan ............................................. 175 Chapter 6 - Insel and the Modern Genius ......................................................................212 The Artist Genius and the Divine ...................................................................................... 217 The Genius of Childhood and Biography ......................................................................... 231 Conclusion...............................................................................................................................249 Appendix - A Chronology of Mina Loy’s Autobiographies.........................................257 Works Consulted.................................................................................................................. 263 3 Abstract This study examines Mina Loy’s unpublished autobiographical writings and challenges the existing critical myth of Loy as the ‘modem woman’. Between 1920 and the late 1940s Loy wrote four overlapping versions of her autobiography: ‘The Child and the Parent’, ‘Goy Israels’, ‘Islands in the Air' and Tnsel'. This study develops a chronology for Loy’s autobiographies and it examines each version’s engagement with constructs of the ‘modem’ and of the ‘modem writer’. Since the 1980s scholars have primarily focused on the ‘modernist’ techniques Loy employed in her early poetry. Often these critical surveys exclude texts that cannot be grouped under the heading ‘modernism’ in order to justify Loy’s inclusion within the movement. Her poetry and her autobiographies written after the late 1920s suggest a shift in her aesthetics away from her earlier ‘modernist’ work. Till now’ her prose and her poetry written after 1925, about two-thirds of her total output, have been excluded from critical evaluations of her writing. Through readings of Loy's unpublished autobiographical manuscripts alongside her later, neglected poems this analysis argues for a broader and less exclusive understanding of Loy’s entire oeuvre. In particular, it will address Loy’s belief in modernism’s ‘prophetic’ potential and how this relates to her autobiographical writings on consciousness and on loss. The study begins with a discussion of ‘modernism’, ‘modernity’ and the ‘modem’, and charts how these terms are defined in Loy’s own essays on literature and art. It also examines Loy’s depictions of Victorian femininity in the context of constructions, then and more recently, of theJhi-de-siecle ‘New’ Woman' and of the twentieth-century ‘modem woman’. My analysis considers how Loy arrived at her current status, via editors, critics and her fellow poets. Ultimately I argue that Loy’s autobiographies portray the inability of ‘modernity’ to exclude the past. 4 Acknowledgments 1 wish to thank Professor Rachel Bowlby for her guidance, support and encouragement. I would also like to offer my gratitude to Dr. Neil Rennie for his insightful comments on my work. Certain Loy scholars have responded kindly to my queries about Loy and their own ongoing work. I am grateful for the correspondence of Roger L. Conover, Marisa Januzzi, and Antonella Francini. Their insights helped me formulate this study. 1 would like to acknowledge the assistance of the excellent staff at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, in particular, Patricia C. Willis, Curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature. I am also indebted to the staff at the University of Maryland Library, the Bibliotheque Nationale, the Houghton Library (Harvard), the McPherson Library (University of Victoria), and the University of London Library for their research assistance. I am also grateful to Claire Burrows and the archive staff at AijoWiggins for their correspondence. I was fortunate to receive a travel bursary from the UCL Graduate School to revisit the Beinecke Library's Mina Loy archive in 2006. Finally, I'd like to thank James Byme, Anne Enderwitz, and Christopher Madden for carefully reading and commenting on this study at various stages and my family for their generous support. 5 Introduction In his introduction to the most recent edition of Mina Loy’s poetry, The Lost Lunar Baedeker (1996), Roger Conover describes her as the forgotten former ‘Belle of the American Poetry Ball’, after which he recounts a typically ‘bohemian’ evening in 1917 at Greenwich Village’s Webster Hall where she, Marcel Duchamp and other members of New York’s avant-garde practised ‘outlandish behaviour’ in full (mandatory) masquerade.1 Conover admits that such recollections of Loy as ‘part of a group’ or as ‘a guest at a ball’, have in effect granted the poet ‘a forceful personality, a cerebral bearing, a perfect complexion, and a sexual body. But not a voice’.2 Yet, some Loy scholars cannot resist lending credibility and glamour to Loy’s literary reputation by listing her artistic allies and by recounting familiar myths of the early twentieth- century avant-garde. It would be premature to ignore this kind of mythmaking and its possible influence on Loy criticism. Despite increasing interest in Loy both within and outside of academia, assumptions made about her life and her character overshadow critical interpretations of her writing. Surely, mythmaking serves a dual purpose, especially in cases of ‘marginalised’ authors: it provides a historical context for the discussion of the author’s artistic contribution and heightens the reader’s sense of his or her uniqueness. Since the 1980s, scholars have used the years between 1914 and 1930 as their point of entry in assessing Loy’s literary contribution. During this period Loy published the writing for which she is best known today, roughly thirty poems and two poem series: ‘Love Songs' (1915-1917) and ‘Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose' (1923-1925). Between the 1920s and the 1950s, Loy published fewer poems and began to write 1 Roger L. Conover, ‘Introduction', The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy, ed. by Roger L. Conover (New York: Noonday Press, 1996), pp. xi-xx (pp .xi). (Hereafter cited LLB96).as “ Conover, ‘Introduction', LLB96, pp. xi-xii. 6 voluminous versions of her autobiography in prose.3 These manuscripts exist in multiple draft versions and are contained in six of the eight boxes at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Many of her prose manuscripts appear to be missing whole sequences of pages. The Beinecke holds almost all seven of Loy’s known autobiographical manuscripts: ‘Brontolivido’; ‘Goy Israels’; ‘Esau Penfold'; ‘The Child and the Parent’; ‘Islands in the Air’ and the manuscript of Insel, which was published in 1991, almost thirty years after Loy’s death.4 ‘Colossus', a narrative based on her relationship with the poet Arthur Cravan remains in private collection, but some excerpts have been published.5 The location of most of her manuscripts in one archive simplifies the process of accessing her unpublished material. However, it is likely that many of Loy’s readers are unaware of the manuscripts' existence because these prose narratives have been excluded almost entirely from
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