This article was downloaded by: [University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)], [Lucia Re] On: 02 August 2013, At: 10:34 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cele20 Mina Loy and the Quest for a Futurist Feminist Woman Lucia Re a a University of California, Los Angeles, 212 Royce Hall, Los Angeles, California 90095-1535, USA Published online: 25 Nov 2009. To cite this article: Lucia Re (2009) Mina Loy and the Quest for a Futurist Feminist Woman, The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms, 14:7, 799-819, DOI: 10.1080/10848770903363896 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10848770903363896 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/termsand-conditions The European Legacy, Vol. 14, No. 7, pp. 799–819, 2009 Mina Loy and the Quest for a Futurist Feminist Woman Downloaded by [University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)], [Lucia Re] at 10:34 02 August 2013 LUCIA RE ABSTRACT Interpreters of futurism are often fascinated by its most violent and misogynistic aspects, ignoring its other sides, and the liberatory effect that its attack on bourgeois values had on a considerable number of women. Yet one of the elements which make the complexity of futurism evident is the substantial participation of women in it. Valentine de Saint-Point, Enif Robert, Maria Ginanni, Irma Valeria, Rosa Rosà, and Benedetta (Marinetti’s wife) were inspired by its groundbreaking, transgressive energy. As futurist writers and artists they contributed to alter and enrich the movement and its language, countering its misogyny, and taking futurism in different directions. Mina Loy, one of the greatest and most influential among the experimental writers of the twentieth century, was inspired by futurism to seek her personal and intellectual liberation as a futurist-feminist woman, and started out her literary career essentially as a futurist poet and iconoclast. Her work, although written in English (a language that Marinetti did not know), is some of the best and most interesting in the literary history of futurism. FUTURISM AND WOMEN In describing her reaction to a Futurist serata in Florence in 1913, Mina Loy, who had been suffering from a spiritual and psychological crisis, wrote that she felt ‘‘as if she had benefited by a fortnight at the seashore.’’1 Yet from its inception in 1909 Italian futurism deployed a language marked by the insistent use of misogynistic images, and it made a certain kind of misogyny (‘‘mépris de la femme’’ or ‘‘disprezzo della donna,’’ i.e. ‘‘scorn for woman’’) the very basis of its supposed novelty and transgressiveness: ‘‘We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.’’2 Like many other rhetorical strategies adopted by futurism and particularly by Marinetti, however, the exaggerated anti-woman discourse and the violent virilism of the first futurist texts— especially the novel Mafarka le futuriste and the early manifestos—were principally intended as means to attract attention, to ‘‘shake up things’’; in short, to outrage and scandalize.3 They were remarkably successful. To a large extent, they opened the way University of California, Los Angeles, 212 Royce Hall, Los Angeles, California 90095-1535, USA. Email: re@humnet.ucla.edu ISSN 1084-8770 print/ISSN 1470-1316 online/09/070799–21 ! 2009 International Society for the Study of European Ideas DOI: 10.1080/10848770903363896 Downloaded by [University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)], [Lucia Re] at 10:34 02 August 2013 800 LUCIA RE for the provocative use of disturbing, sexually charged and violent discourse, which has continued to characterize a certain type of avant-garde art up to, for example, Robert Mapplethorpe’s controversial work. Mafarka, for which Marinetti was charged with obscenity (oltraggio al pudore) when the book came out in Decio Cinti’s Italian translation, earned Marinetti a notoriety that endures today. At the time, a highly publicized trial led eventually to a suspended sentence.4 The novel, however, whose eponymous hero Mafarka, the warrior king of the African city of Tell-el-Kibir, dreams of generating a mechanical son out of his own body and ‘‘without the aid of the vulva’’ or the ‘‘complicity and help of the female womb,’’5 has continued to be the object of scandal and has been put ‘‘on trial’’ again several times by critics even recently—a ‘‘success’’ which would have surely delighted Marinetti.6 Certainly the misogynist violence of Mafarka, the early manifestos, and other early as well as later texts cannot be condoned or ignored, but it needs to be understood in its cultural and historical context. The regressively violent, protofascist and then fascist aspects of futurism coexist and often conflict in paradoxical and ironic ways with emancipatory and liberating impulses and tendencies that continued to surface and find expression in futurist art and writing well after the First World War.7 Critical interpreters of Italian futurism, especially in the English-speaking world, have tended to be fascinated by its most violent and misogynistic aspects, ignoring or dismissing its other sides and, in particular, the liberatory and empowering effect that its attack on bourgeois and traditional moralistic and repressive values had on a considerable number of women of various nationalities. Yet one of the elements which make the rich, if contradictory, complexity of futurism evident is indeed the substantial participation of women in it. From, among others, Valentine de Saint-Point to Enif Robert, Maria Ginanni, Irma Valeria, the Lithuanian-born Eva Khün, and the Austrian emigrée Rosa Rosà (Edyth von Haynau) to Marinetti’s wife, Benedetta, these women, often barely mentioned in comprehensive discussions of futurism, were inspired by its groundbreaking, iconoclastic energy. As futurist writers and artists they contributed significantly to alter and enrich the movement and its language, countering its misogyny, and taking futurism in different creative directions, often disregarding Marinetti’s directives.8 It is therefore rather misleading and historically narrow to associate Italian futurism tout court with the misogynistic violence of its origins, for in its long and complex history futurism’s relationship with women and its construction of ‘‘the feminine’’ went through several different phases, although the discourse concerning gender and the relation between the sexes remained a fundamental ground on which futurism insistently displayed its ‘‘difference’’ and staked its importance as an avant-garde movement.9 Certainly futurism was the first literary or aesthetic movement in Italy actively to encourage the participation of women, historically excluded from the traditionally masculinist realm of cultural production. MINA LOY FUTURIST ICONOCLASM: TOWARDS A NEW POETICS AND THE LEAP It is one of the many ironies of the history of futurism’s relationship with women that some of the earliest futurist texts written by a woman, Mina Loy, were not in Italian Downloaded by [University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)], [Lucia Re] at 10:34 02 August 2013 Mina Loy and the Quest for a Futurist Feminist Woman 801 but in English, a language that Marinetti did not know. These texts have long been ignored in discussions of futurism, even though Loy was arguably one of the greatest and most influential among the experimental writers of this century in any language.10 The archival work of Roger L. Conover, Carolyn Burke, and others has now restored most of these texts to us, and the influence of futurism on Loy has become evident. Although Loy went on to experiment with other avant-garde modes after her futurist ‘‘phase,’’ it is clear that her restlessness, rebellion, iconoclasm, sexual explicitness, satirical wit, and especially her constant urge to change and to reinvent herself, owed a lot to the futurist ‘‘spirit’’ which shaped her entire approach to life and art.11 The urge to experiment with the juxtaposition of different avant-garde modes, such as futurism and surrealism, and even to hybridize them in heretical new ways (which included an uncanny and, in Marinetti’s eyes, ‘‘regressive’’ recovery of the symbolist imaginary), is a tendency shared by several futurist women, including Benedetta and Maria Ginanni.12 Loy’s first published poem, and the first evidence of her interest in the avant-garde movement founded by Marinetti, was the 1914 ‘‘Aphorisms on Futurism,’’ which appeared in Alfred Stieglitz’s ‘‘epochal’’ quarterly, Camera Work.13 Written by using the characteristically synthetic form, bold capitals, expressive typography and performative language of the futurist manifesto and free-word poetry, the poem exudes the enthusiasm of the neophyte: ‘‘DIE in the Past / Live in the Future. THE velocity of velocities arrives in starting’’—declare the opening lines (Baedeker, 149). But the poem also reverberates with personal allusions, as if Loy were speaking to her own rejuvenated self as well as to the reader: ‘‘BUT the Future is only dark from outside. / Leap into it—and it EXPLODES with Light.’’ Loy welcomed futurism as an invitation to creativity and to a positive, affirmative view of life’s connection with art: ‘‘THE futurist must leap from affirmative to affirmative, ignoring intermittent negations—must spring from stepping stone to stone of creative explorations; without slipping back into the turbid stream of accepted facts.’’ No irony is detectable in these aphorisms yet; only the joy of discovery. Loy, who had started out as a figurative painter in the Liberty style and had successfully exhibited her work in London in 1912, seems to have first encountered futurist themes and images through the work of Wyndham Lewis, whose vigorous semiabstractions and hard-edged geometrical figures propelled explosively though space impressed her a great deal when she saw his work at the second Post-Impressionist exhibition in London. Lewis, however, soon turned away from futurist influences and from what he viewed as the excessive emphasis of futurism on movement, which in his view produced blurring, confusion, and indistinct, weak images, while—even in producing effects of explosive violence—he opted for a more ‘‘masculine’’ structural clarity and precision of contours. The quintessentially futurist notions of movement and of dynamism, on the other hand, with all their psychological and political implications, were precisely what fascinated Loy most. Loy, who at the time had been diagnosed as suffering from the female malady of the time, neurasthenia, and was trying to extricate herself from her marriage to the painter Stephen Haweis, found futurism therapeutic and sexually liberating and exhilarating. As Carolyn Burke reports, she and Frances Stevens studied the futurist manifestos and catalogues as if they were news from the front.14 Although the futurists themselves may have found this surprising, the ‘‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting’’ had unforeseen feminist implications. It called not only Downloaded by [University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)], [Lucia Re] at 10:34 02 August 2013 802 LUCIA RE for the abolition of mimetic representation and its replacement by the rendering of movement and ‘‘dynamic sensation,’’ but it also inveighed against ‘‘the nude in painting, as nauseous and tedious as adultery in literature.’’ The practice of painting from a model was an act of ‘‘mental cowardice.’’ The futurists concluded their manifesto by demanding for ten years the total suppression of the nude in painting.15 The nude, as feminist scholarship has demonstrated, served as the principal means for the objectification and immobilization of woman by the male gaze in the western pictorial tradition.16 Mina Loy herself, in the first year of her marriage to Stephen Haweis, had posed nude as a beautiful object for her husband’s camera in his studio (he specialized in photographs of Rodin’s sculptures), portrayed in the hip-shot pose of classical statuary. She seemingly at this stage of her life resigned herself to be the subject rather than the maker of portraits, and the object rather than the subject of the gaze. Futurism, instead, especially in paintings such as Boccioni’s Visioni simultanee (Simultaneous Visions) and La strada entra nella casa (The Street Enters the House) seemed suddenly to mobilize woman’s own gaze. The introduction to the illustrated catalogue of the 1912 exhibition of futurist painting that opened at Berneheim-Jeune in Paris and circulated to London and various other European countries presented La strada entra nella casa as a quintessential example of the new futurist art.17 This surprising gender inversion of the traditional gaze structure of western painting was unmatched by other avant-garde movements at the time. Even Picasso and Duchamp, while decomposing perspective and revolutionizing representation, were still painting nudes and looking through an implicitly masculine gaze. (I am thinking in particular of Picasso’s cubist nudes painted in 1909, and of Duchamp’s famous Nu descendant un escalier [Nude Descending a Staircase] of 1912.) Just as in their iconoclastic exaltation of intuition, primitivism, dis-order, bodily sensations, materiality and sexuality, the futurists had unwittingly appropriated a ‘‘feminine’’ realm and deprived it of its negative connotations, so now, in abolishing the nude and making the viewer look as if through a woman’s eyes, they were effectively dismantling one of the principal aesthetic and visual codes of western patriarchal culture. But the futurist revolution was not limited to gender politics, i.e., the provocative refashioning of the cultural and pragmatic relation between the sexes, and their cultural representations. The further political implications of futurist dynamism and activism were spelled out in the 1912 catalogue by commenting on some of the other paintings in the exhibition, which included explicitly incendiary works such as Russolo’s The Revolt and Boccioni’s Riot in the Galleria. The catalogue essay (which was signed by Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo, Balla, and Severini, although conceived principally by Boccioni) specified that ‘‘if we paint the phases of a riot, the crowd bustling with uplifted fists. . .’’ the role of the viewer is not limited to ‘‘being present,’’ but s/he must ‘‘participate in the action.’’18 Frances Stevens found these ideas so exciting that she began translating the manifestos, and with Mina Loy she discussed the meaning of futurist dynamism. Both frequented the Caffè delle Giubbe Rosse in Florence, the hangout of avant-garde painters and writers at the time. The painters Ardengo Soffici and Carlo Carrà (who was in love with Loy and even proposed to her at one point) began to turn up on the Costa San Giorgio, where the two women lived, trying to enlist Frances in the futurist movement. Eventually they brought Marinetti with them to meet Frances, but Marinetti Downloaded by [University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)], [Lucia Re] at 10:34 02 August 2013 Mina Loy and the Quest for a Futurist Feminist Woman 803 immediately turned to the older Loy and asked her to give herself to him. It was, according to Loy, a coup de théâtre for the benefit of his comrades. However, they soon became involved in a thrilling relationship, a kind of sex war with virtuoso verbal combat and repeated reciprocal stabs. During her liaison with Marinetti, which lasted a few intense months and ended in 1915, Loy began to write a roman à clef in which she recorded their conversations, and took note especially of the competitiveness and reciprocal resentment of Marinetti and Papini.19 Loy chided Marinetti for his pretentiousness while he tried to win her over to un-romantic, energizing and strengthening futurist love, criticizing her for being ‘‘too mystical.’’ ‘‘His tactile adroitness equaled his conversational celerity,’’ she wrote.20 The liaison eventually developed in unforeseen and ironic ways: on returning from one of his many trips in 1914, Marinetti swore to Mina that he had been faithful to her and that she was the only woman in his life. Mina, who found him ‘‘one of the most satisfying personalities I ever came in contact with,’’ fantasized about having a child of his.21 In November 1913, Frances and Mina were able to see the exhibition of futurist painting in Florence, a huge succès de scandale. The following month she attended the serata futurista at the Teatro Verdi that left her feeling as if she had gone on a two-week holiday. By spring, prompted by Soffici, who had invited her and Frances to show their work at the Sprovieri Gallery, she started painting futurist paintings to be exhibited in Rome and feeling like she was entering a Vita Nuova.22 Unfortunately, all traces of Loy’s paintings from this period seem to have been lost. But what propelled Loy into her new life was writing rather than painting. MINA LOY, FUTURIST POET Boccioni’s paintings La strada entra nella casa and Visioni simultanee, and the futurist fascination with the multi-sensory excitement of urban street life, along with Marinetti’s 1912 ‘‘Manifesto Tecnico della letteratura futurista’’ (‘‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature’’), the 1913 ‘‘Distruzione della Sintassi Immaginazione senza fili Parole in Libertà’’ (‘‘Destruction of Syntax Imagination Without Strings Words in Freedom’’) and the 1914 ‘‘Lo splendore geometrico e meccanico e la sensibilità numerica’’ (‘‘Geometric and Mechanical Splendor and the Numerical Sensibility’’) inspired one of her more evocative and visually vivid, painterly futurist poems, ‘‘The Costa San Giorgio’’ (Baedeker 10-12) probably written in the summer of 1914. ‘‘OUT / Onto the middle of the street,’’ are the closing lines and the culmination of this poem, typically futurist in its ‘‘telegraphic’’ and synthetic rendering of the multiple, intersecting and overlapping sensations, sounds, images, smells, even the taste and flavors of a street in Florence. The sensory experience is conveyed with characteristic futurist playfulness, through onomatopoeia, fragmented syntax, lack of punctuation, and expressive spacing. Loy was, it seems, an even more enthusiastic interpreter of the ‘‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Poetry’’ than Marinetti himself, and a brilliant practitioner of its radical poetics. There is no ‘‘I’’ in this poem, and no lyric love or sentiments; only an ironic ‘‘We English’’ at the beginning, and then the juxtaposition— reminiscent of montage and collage—of sensations and observations gathered from 804 LUCIA RE Downloaded by [University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)], [Lucia Re] at 10:34 02 August 2013 different moments and moods, by a self multiplied and divided through time and space. The first three stanzas read as follows: We English make a tepid blot On the messiness Of the passionate Italian life-traffic Throbbing the street up steep Up up to the porta Culminating In the stained frescoes of the dragon-slayer The hips of women sway Among the crawling children they produce And the church hits the barracks Where The greyness of marching men Falls through the greyness of stone Oranges half-rotten are sold at reduction Hoarsely advertised as broken heads BROKEN HEADS and the barber Has an imitation mirror And Mary preserve our mistresses from seeing us as we see ourselves Shaving ICE CREAM Licking is larger than mouths Boots than feet Slip Slap and the string dragging And the angle of the sun Cuts the whole lot in half Besides the visual vocabulary of Boccioni’s synthetic dynamism, this poem surely evokes, more than the violent exuberance of Marinetti’s own words in freedom, the gentler playfulness of Palazzeschi’s poetry. Yet the specific influence of Marinetti is also clear. In the manifestos that Loy read so intently, Marinetti advocated the replacement of the traditional lyric self with an ‘‘io mutevole’’ (‘‘a mutable I’’) and ‘‘coscienze molteplici e simultanee in uno stesso individuo’’ (‘‘multiple simultaneous consciousnesses within the same individual’’), freed from the constrictions of syntax. This implied, essentially, a dismantling of the traditional bourgeois sense of self and identity as a linguistic construction. It meant abandoning the idea of a unified, coherent and constant subjectivity. This ‘‘crisis of consciousness’’ in many ways was nothing new. In Italy, for example, it already permeated modernist thought and writing through the work of Luigi Pirandello, whose Il fu Mattia Pascal (The Late Mattia Pascal) was published in 1904. But while Pirandello and others mourned the loss of the sense of a unified subjectivity, futurism celebrated this same loss and joyfully made it the start of a new aesthetic. The new, multiplied subjectivity fostered by modernity would be stronger, not weaker; it would allow for ‘‘multiform emotional perspectives’’ and would intuitively Downloaded by [University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)], [Lucia Re] at 10:34 02 August 2013 Mina Loy and the Quest for a Futurist Feminist Woman 805 link its sensations with the entire universe.23 Loy, who had been struggling with what doctors called ‘‘her nerves’’ had been ordered periodically to rest in bed, without reading, writing or speaking, and to lie absolutely still and in the dark. This was a kind of ‘‘therapy’’ often prescribed at the time for women deemed to be ‘‘hysterical’’ or ‘‘neurasthenic,’’ usually because they behaved in ways deemed to be transgressive and inappropriate. Loy found that futurism suddenly made her feel alive again, possessed by the desire to paint and to write. Futurism, with its call for art as an intensification of life, an art that ‘‘in fretta vi getterà affannosamente nei nervi le sue sensazioni visive, auditive, olfattive, secondo la loro corrente incalzante’’ (‘‘will throw rapidly and breathlessly onto your nerves its visual, auditory, and olfactory sensations, in a relentless wave’’ [TIF, 70]), was the exact opposite of the cure (sensory deprivation) that doctors believed was right for women like her at the time. Futurism provided Loy with a new, exuberant ethics of life, and this is largely what attracted her and several other women to the futurist movement. In her 1919 novel, Un ventre di donna (The Womb of a Woman), the Italian actress Enif Robert describes her own conversion to futurism in similar terms, as a life-restoring therapy and a rebirth into a new life filled with creativity, sensual joy and self-confidence. Futurism allowed Loy to see ‘‘the crisis of consciousness’’ as the positive dismantling of an obsolete form of identity: ‘‘TODAY is the crisis of consciousness,’’ she announced triumphantly in her ‘‘Aphorisms on Futurism,’’ ‘‘LET the Universe flow into your consciousness, there is no limit to its capacity, nothing that it shall not re-create’’ (Baedeker, 151). Loy’s ‘‘Songs to Joannes’’ (Baedeker, 53–68), written mostly in 1915, contain some of Loy’s best poetry, and some of the best and most original poetry of all of futurism.24 Spawn of Fantasies Silting the appraisable Pig Cupid his rosy snout Rooting erotic garbage ‘‘Once Upon a Time’’ Pulls a weed white star-topped Among wild oats sown in mucous-membrane I would an eye in a Bengal light Eternity in a sky-rocket Constellations in an ocean Whose rivers run no fresher Than a trickle of saliva These are suspect places I must live in my lantern Trimming subliminal flicker Virginal to the bellows Of Experience. Coloured glass Loy had learned the futurist art of outrage well. The publication of the first four sections of ‘‘Songs of Joannes’’ in the inaugural issue of Others: A Magazine of New Verse ( July 1915) under the title of ‘‘Love Songs,’’ the first of which is quoted above, helped to Downloaded by [University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)], [Lucia Re] at 10:34 02 August 2013 806 LUCIA RE generate a small riot when the magazine hit the stands. As Alfred Kreymborg, her editor, recalled: ‘‘Detractors shuddered at Mina Loy’s subject-matter and derided her elimination of punctuation marks and the audacious spacing of her lines.’’ 25 Her deployment of typically futurist devices such as mixed lower and upper case letters, blank spaces and dashes instead of punctuation, and montage-like juxtapositions was as scandalous as her subject matter and tone. ‘‘[Her] clinical frankness [and] sardonic conclusions, wedded to a madly elliptical style scornful of regular grammar, syntax, punctuation . . . drove our critics into furious despair . . .. The utter nonchalance in revealing the secrets of sex was denounced as nothing less than lewd . . .. To reduce eroticism to the sty was an outrage, and to do so without verbs, sentence structure . . . [was] even more offensive.’’ Critics were especially outraged that a woman should do this. Some considered Loy’s work ‘‘pure pornography.’’ Others considered her poetic challenge to form a pernicious equivalent of the suffragist challenge.26 In ‘‘Songs of Joannes’’ Loy was fully consistent with the futurist polemic against ‘‘love,’’ the ‘‘moonshine’’ and ‘‘sentimentalism’’ (‘‘Rot / to the recurrent moon’’ are two of her most memorable lines) (Baedeker, 62). As influenced and even inspired by futurism as these poems are, they also bear the traces of a strong English-language tradition of women poets that Loy read and admired, especially Emily Dickinson, whose condensed spatiality (in contrast to the futurist tendency to ‘‘fill’’ the space of the page) Loy adapted, and Gertrude Stein, whose concern for introspection (which Marinetti despised) and use of rhythmic recurrence (which Marinetti thought excessively fetishistic) also seem to have influenced her. Loy was among the earliest readers and admirers of Stein, whose Three Lives came out in 1909, and Tender Buttons in 1914. (Futurism may in turn have also influenced Stein’s experimentation with language and punctuation, although no specific studies corroborating this hypothesis have been done, and Stein herself seems— rather futuristically to be sure—to have felt only scorn for Marinetti).27 DISCOVERING A NEW FEMININE-MASCULINE IDENTITY Loy’s irreverence, laughter and ‘‘brutality’’ owed a lot to Marinetti and futurism, but she soon learned to turn the futurists’ own weapons against them. This was perhaps the most consequential and rigorous way for a woman to be a futurist. From the beginning Loy had been uneasy about the misogynist rhetoric of futurism, even though, as pointed out by Conover, Marinetti’s misogyny was more ‘‘editorially than behaviorally conspicuous’’ (Baedeker, 180). Loy felt that Marinetti’s claim that futurism did not scorn exceptional intellectual women (donne di genio) like her was a trap. ‘‘Songs of Joannes’’ contains a poem that is a feminist critique of the misogynist evolutionist scenario which subtended Mafarka: Evolution fall foul of Sexual equality Prettily miscalculate Similitude Unnatural selection Breed such sons and daughters As shall jibber at each other Mina Loy and the Quest for a Futurist Feminist Woman 807 Downloaded by [University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)], [Lucia Re] at 10:34 02 August 2013 Uninterpretable cryptonyms Under the moon (Baedeker, 65) It should be noted, however, that Loy’s objections are not to the evolutionist scenario per se, but rather to its sexual bias, of which she stigmatizes the absurdity. Superior beings could not be created by superior men alone. In taking a position which was simultaneously (and paradoxically) Nietzschean and feminist, Loy was, perhaps unknowingly, close to her Italian contemporary, the writer Sibilla Aleramo, as well as to the futurist feminist Valentine de Saint-Point. Aleramo and Loy in particular (de Saint-Point is a slightly different case), however sympathetic they may have been to women in general, and however close they may have felt in particular to women from the less advantaged social classes, still pursued the ideal of self-differentiation and heroism of a cultivated and superior elite, whose will power, intelligence, and vision would serve as models and provide an ‘‘advanced’’ genetic patrimony for an entire people or ‘‘race,’’ leading it forward in the evolutionary process. Eugenics and the theories of racial ‘‘improvement’’ which originated in the later nineteenth century were beginning to be very popular in Europe and in the United States at the time. Loy, who was born in England and was part Hungarian-Jewish, advocated a kind of feminist eugenic practice grounded in the benefits of mixed race breeding. This is certainly one of her most controversial and discussed aspects.28 Yet Loy, as Carolyn Burke has shown, developed many of her feminist insights into the patriarchal oppression of women by watching sympathetically the lives of her lower middle-class and lower-class female neighbors in Florence. She gradually became aware of the dismal oppression of women in Italy, and explicitly thematized it in some of her poems.29 (She seems, on the other hand, to have had little or no contact with women intellectuals in Italy at the time, including Aleramo). This did not prevent her, however, from subscribing to a version of Marinetti’s cult of i geniali, which in his provocative and paradoxical expression constituted a ‘‘proletariat’’ of their own and would lead the only authentic revolution to come.30 In the summer of 1916, shortly before her departure for New York, when her affair with Marinetti was already over, she boasted to Carl van Vechten that Marinetti had called her a ‘‘genius’’ after she had taken the pleasure of reading and translating for him a futurist dialogue in which she took the role of ‘‘love,’’ debating Marinetti in the role of ‘‘futurism.’’31 During her liaison with Marinetti, Loy felt great ambivalence toward him but even after the end of the affair she wrote: ‘‘I am indebted to [FTM] for twenty years added to my life from mere contact with his exuberant personality.’’32 In the 1912 technical manifesto, Marinetti had spelled out the need to abolish the ‘‘I’’ in literature in order to replace it with the immediate rendering of physical perceptions and joyful, irreverent and a-logical analogies, violently yoking together the most disparate realms of the physical and mental world. He had also provided his own war-inspired wordin-freedom poem as an example. The ‘‘I’’ was to be infinitely multiplied, scattered and rejuvenated as if through waves of electrical energy, and the experience and lyrical rendering of war was the best way to do this. War, the almost sexual ecstasy of violent explosions celebrated in Zang Tumb Tuum, was hailed by Marinetti as the ultimate arena for this joyful reforging of a multiplied self. Loy fully embraced Marinetti’s Downloaded by [University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)], [Lucia Re] at 10:34 02 August 2013 808 LUCIA RE enthusiasm for the war. Like Marinetti, she had the sensation that war was somehow an aphrodisiac. In her letters written while she was a volunteer nurse for the Red Cross in Florence, she (like Enif Robert would also do, among others) expressed envy for young male soldiers going to the front. ‘‘My masculine side longs for war,’’ she confessed to a friend. She had become a nurse in a surgical hospital for entirely unsentimental reasons, ‘‘entirely on the chance of getting near a battlefield & hearing lovely noises!’’33 She envied Marinetti’s opportunities for heroism and dreamed of the wonderful poems she could have written about a battlefield. Like a number of later women futurists, she felt masculinized, although as one of the very first of these women to experience this sensation she felt strange and unique, suspecting that she was ‘‘the only female who has reacted to it [FTM’s energy]—exactly the way men do. Of course being the most female thing extant—I’m somewhat masculine.’’34 It was part of the unsettling irony and gender trouble generated by futurism and the war for futurist men to cross over into a ‘‘feminine territory’’ and attempt to expropriate it, while women were pressed in the opposite direction of ‘‘masculinization.’’ THE PERILS OF MASCULINIZATION AND THE POWER OF THE MATERNAL BODY This gender crossing was a much more perilous adventure for women than for men. Loy was repeatedly censored by critics, including the influential Amy Lowell, who threatened to withdraw support from Others because of ‘‘Love Songs.’’ Loy’s husband wrote from New York in response to ‘‘Love Songs’’ that she should ‘‘study literature for a few years’’ before posing as a writer.35 He attempted to keep control of her painting, her art and her life, even though they were separated and she had complete responsibility for the children. He repeatedly refused to grant her a divorce. Loy had difficulties publishing and was strapped for money. She began selling her belongings during the war and resumed her career as a fashion designer in order make ends meet (after all, fashion-design was becoming a futurist tradition after Balla’s ‘‘Anti-Neutral Clothing’’).36 Yet, even in the midst of her futurist phase in which she felt herself ‘‘multiplied’’ and masculinized, she wrote a poem, ‘‘Parturition’’ (Baedeker 4-8) about a quintessentially female experience, that of giving birth to a child. This was the same experience that in Mafarka Marinetti had wished both to expropriate and to eradicate, and that Croce had pointed to as the insurmountable obstacle to female literary creativity.37 When she wrote this poem in 1914, Loy had already experienced childbirth three times (1904, 1907, and 1909: she had a fourth child in 1919). Yet, ironically, it was futurism which inspired her to write about the experience of childbirth. And, like Benedetta, she came to think of her children as works of art. The notions that inform Loy’s poem of a self extending its boundaries through physical sensation (‘‘I am the centre / Of a circle of pain / Exceeding its boundaries in every direction’’), a self that is doubled and thus multiplied, and a body whose energy, perceptions and nerve vibrations (‘‘On infinitely prolonged nerve-vibrations’’) place it in contact with an entire universe of matter, are central to the futurist ethos. Indeed, more than any of her more explicit later feminist polemics against futurist misogyny, this poem vividly discloses how much of futurism is in effect an attempt to co-opt and expropriate a female and feminine territory. Downloaded by [University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)], [Lucia Re] at 10:34 02 August 2013 Mina Loy and the Quest for a Futurist Feminist Woman 809 The life-giving, energizing power of the ‘‘cosmically connected’’ maternal female body, suggestively called by contemporary feminist thinkers of the Italian Diotima group the ability to ‘‘mettere al mondo il mondo’’ (‘‘give birth to the world’’),38 is the ultimate object of a deeply-rooted envy which secretly motivates the futurist urge (evident in works ranging from Mafarka to Boccioni’s ‘‘Materia’’ and beyond) to supplant or incorporate the power of the mater. The ‘‘feminine’’ that Loy’s ‘‘Parturition’’ foregrounds, however is not just the corporeal, nor is hers a kind of bodily écriture feminine. Rather, the poem effectively performs a double unmasking of ‘‘the body’’—one instigated by futurism, and one exposing futurism. The former coincides with futurism’s rejection of metaphysics—the notion dominant in the western philosophical tradition and embraced by both Benedetto Croce and Otto Weininger (and Giovanni Papini) that thought and beauty and genuine creativity are of the spirit (and thus masculine), thus excluding from it both the body and the feminine. In its anti-aesthetic, anti-metaphysical thrust to recuperate the body, the sexual and the material for modern thought and creativity, futurism is exposed as entirely masculine, thus altogether eliding sexual difference. So, while Loy subscribes to futurism’s anti-metaphysical recuperation of the body and sexuality, she also objects to and rejects its monological virilization. Only a few years later, the women publishing in the wartime journal L’Italia futurista took a similar stand, and Benedetta, especially in her experimental novel Le forze umane, written in the late 1910s and published in 1924, elaborated a vision that contested the futurist one-sex model and exalted motherhood and female creativity. In 1936, the futurist painter and sculptor Marisa Mori painted the strikingly sensual Ebbrezza fisica della maternità (Physical Inebriation of Motherhood), a semi-abstract work that unknowingly echoed in visual terms many of the key themes of Loy’s ‘‘Parturition.’’39 Loy’s poem belongs to the history of literature not only because it is apparently the first poem ever written about the physical experience of childbirth from the point of view of a woman in labor, but also because it is among the first texts in English to use montage/collage as a texturing device.40 Its linking of sex and eroticism with images of childbirth and the maternal also make it a remarkable event in the literature of modern sexuality. ‘‘Parturition’’ is written with Loy’s characteristically futurist lack of punctuation, expressive spacing, and a montage-like juxtaposition of different sequences and perceptions. In its ‘‘synthetic dynamism,’’ its rendering of physical sensations, the interpenetration of mind and environment, the energies traversing the body, and the blurring of time and space, the poem is definitely a futurist text. Yet it is also ‘‘heretical’’ from a futurist viewpoint not only because it celebrates the feminine and the maternal but also because it posits explicitly a unification of the ego: ‘‘And the ego succeeds in unifying the positive and negative/poles of sensation/Uniting the opposing and resisting forces/In lascivious revelation’’ (6). The experience of childbirth, however, is neither idealized nor romanticized. Rather, it is lucidly dissected in its connections to sexuality and eroticism, the physical pain of labor, and the strange rhythms of time and consciousness created by the successive waves and the subsiding of contractions. Ontological questions of identity and sameness, of difference and repetition are juxtaposed with sheer physical sensations as if arising directly from them: ‘‘Mother I am/Identical/With infinite Maternity/Indivisible/ Acutely/I am absorbed/Into/The was—is—ever—shall—be/Of cosmic reproductivity.’’ Downloaded by [University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)], [Lucia Re] at 10:34 02 August 2013 810 LUCIA RE ‘‘Against my thigh/Touch of infinitesimal motion/Scarcely perceptible/Undulation/ Warmth moisture.’’ A third level of images is provided by associations emerging from the unconscious and the subconscious—dimensions to which Marinetti vehemently denied both existence and value, deriding Freud and the Freudians, even though other futurists, among whom several women, and Marinetti’s wife Benedetta, had taken a keen interest in it, and eventually developed a distinctive blend of surrealism and futurism in their work. Loy’s poem is also suffused with proto-surrealist images: ‘‘Rises from the subconscious/Impressions of a cat/With blind kittens/Among her legs/Same undulating life-stir/I am that cat Rises form the subconscious/Impression of small animal carcass/ Covered with blue bottles.’’ Loy disliked Marinetti’s boastfulness and objected to the futurist scorn of woman, and found Marinetti’s most recent virilist manifesto, ostensibly a letter addressed to ‘‘alcune amiche cosmopolite che danno dei thè tango e si parsifalizzano’’(‘‘some women friends who offer tango teas and Parsifalize themselves’’), entitled ‘‘Abbasso il tango e Parsifal!’’(‘‘Down with the Tango and Parsifal!’’)—published in Lacerba in January 1914— particularly distasteful. In the context of the conflict between Marinetti and Papini, however, the manifesto’s provocative insistence on heterosexuality and ‘‘penetration’’ as a display of futurist virility appear to be an act of (in)civil war between men, a polemic addressed more towards Papini and other Weiningerian, heterophobic and homophilic members of Lacerba, than towards women indulging in tango-dancing. Loy, being at the center of it, was well aware of the theatrical dynamic of these exchanges, and enjoyed the spectacle even as she acted in it. Skeptical of Marinetti’s violence, she was nevertheless seduced by his energy: ‘‘I am in the throes of conversion to Futurism,’’ she wrote to her friend Mabel Dodge, ‘‘but I shall never convince myself. There is no hope in any system that ‘combat le mal avec le mal’ & that is really Marinetti’s philosophy— though he is one of the most satisfying personalities I ever came in contact with.’’41 A few months later, she felt her futurist risorgimento had begun, and wrote her ‘‘Aphorisms on Futurism.’’ Ironically, despite or perhaps because of Papini’s sexual failures, Loy found him more sympathetic than Marinetti, and for a time developed a deep romantic attachment for him,42 though she, having learned from Marinetti the art of combating ‘‘le mal avec le mal,’’ retrospectively made him the subject of a savage satire, when the affair was over, in two of her most famous poems, ‘‘Giovanni Franchi’’ and ‘‘The Effectual Marriage,’’ both from 1915. In contrast to Papini—whose tortured personality would eventually lead him back, in a much publicized ‘‘conversion’’ in 1921, to a fervent Catholicism—Marinetti seemed to be refreshingly direct. As Loy’s biographer observes, Marinetti’s ‘‘exuberant personality’’ and boundless energy during their intermittent wartime affair (Marinetti kept taking off for London, Paris and even Russia, while Mina Loy stayed in Florence), and especially his encouragement to dare to be what she wanted, helped her to defy the expectations of her bourgeois upbringing and the late-Victorian education of her childhood, extricate herself from her unhappy marriage to Stephen Haiwes, and gain a self-confidence that she never had before. Mina Loy and the Quest for a Futurist Feminist Woman 811 Downloaded by [University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)], [Lucia Re] at 10:34 02 August 2013 LOY’S FUTURIST FEMINISM One of the many ironies of Loy’s complex involvement with futurism is that it awoke in her for the first time an interest in ‘‘the woman question’’ and feminist politics. Soon after the end of her affair with Marinetti, she wrote to Mabel Dodge about her ‘‘defeat in the sex war’’ and then proceeded to make inquiries about feminism in the United States. ‘‘What I feel now are feminine politics,’’ she wrote at about the same time to her friend Carl Van Vechten. While in her poems she would soon stigmatize futurist misogyny, and mock Marinetti’s machismo, making in fact a kind of poetic reputation for herself out of repeated (and well-deserved) Marinetti-bashings,43 in her letters she described her energy and optimism as products of futurism, and referred to Marinetti as a ‘‘fallen angel’’ sent to rescue her ‘‘—& they say he is a brute to women!’’44 Loy knew about Marinetti’s interest in feminism and his idiosyncratic support of the British suffragists. Her extraordinary ‘‘Feminist Manifesto,’’ written in November 1914, when she was still involved with Marinetti, is perhaps the most eloquent document of Loy’s futurism. The manifesto was never published in Loy’s lifetime, and it appeared in correct form only in the 1996 Conover edition of Lunar Baedeker, based on the manuscript copy sent by Loy to Mabel Dodge in 1914.45 The manifesto is written in the typical style of futurist manifestos at the time of Lacerba, using a free-word prose made visually striking and emphatic through the use of expressive spacing, bold capital letters, and underlining. It is, in the best futurist tradition, an outrageous and provocative text. Contemporary feminists have found it troubling, and scholars have been puzzled by it, suggesting that it may have been written as a reaction to the misogyny of the founding manifesto of 1909, or to ‘‘counterbalance’’ Valentine de Saint-Point’s manifestos.46 But in fact de Saint-Point’s and Loy’s manifestos have some striking thematic similarities. In her first manifesto, Valentine argued against biological essentialism, claiming that to divide humanity along gender lines on the basis of sexual difference is absurd, inasmuch as it is neither an absolute nor a valid basis for differentiating among human beings. Not only do men and women alike partake of the masculine and the feminine in varying degrees across a spectrum of sexual roles and attitudes but, according to Valentine, the feminine and the masculine themselves are relative categories, culturally and historically variable and subject to change, rather than a fixed binary opposition. If women at present happen to be trapped by the traditional patriarchal roles and values denounced by Marinetti, it is not because these roles belong to them naturally or by instinct, for women can also be virile warriors. Woman should abandon those qualities of passivity and patience that have traditionally been assigned to her as the angel of the hearth. The role of wife should be abolished altogether, freeing woman from her subjection to man. One of the most striking contentions of Valentine’s two manifestos, couched in a rather melodramatic and hyperbolic language designed (in true futurist fashion) to shock the audience, was the notion that the libido or life-instinct is a sexually unmarked instinctual force active in both men and women, whose potential violence is also common to both sexes. Like Marinetti, Valentine associates virility with war, conflict and aggression, and femininity with peace, mediation and non-violence (as well as intuition and imagination). But she denies that women are naturally, ‘‘by instinct’’ wise, peaceful and ‘‘good,’’ thus implicitly rejecting the notion that women are inherently ‘‘feminine.’’ This is the core of her objections to Marinetti, Downloaded by [University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)], [Lucia Re] at 10:34 02 August 2013 812 LUCIA RE who in his work had appeared to conflate women and the feminine. What distinguishes Valentine’s position most sharply from that of Marinetti, and the reason of the controversy that led her to write the second manifesto, is her re-evaluation of female eros and sexual desire, which she calls luxure (lust). Luxure for Valentine is the most potentially transgressive force in human existence for both men and women, who must become conscious of its psychology and value while freeing themselves from all forms of sentimental mystification and moralism. Female sexuality in particular does not have to be passive, hidden, or repressed, she argues in ‘‘Manifeste futuriste de la luxure.’’ It can on the contrary be a source of strength and creative inspiration for women. Of all of Valentine’s ideas, this was probably the most influential. It resonated deeply within futurism, and we find variations of it in the work of Mina Loy (as well as in the work of Enif Robert and Benedetta, among others). Claiming to be a feminist text, Loy’s manifesto starts out aggressively, in an apparent paradox, by vehemently attacking the feminist movement: ‘‘The feminist movement as at present instituted is / Inadequate . . . Women . . . are you prepared for the Wrench—?’’ The manifesto goes on to denounce as ‘‘pathetic clap-trap’’ the notion, proclaimed by both Italian and British reformist feminism at the time, that woman should be granted the right to vote because she is the equal of man. ‘‘All your pet illusions must be unmasked,’’ shouts Loy. Placing confidence in legislation is pointless, she argues, because the political and cultural system themselves are in need of ‘‘Absolute Demolition.’’ Both women and men, according to Loy, are the victims of a cultural construction of gender based on reciprocal exploitation; men exploit women sexually, and women exploit men financially. Thus women’s only real choices in the present system are parasitism or prostitution, which correspond to the roles of mistress or mother assigned by bourgeois society to women. Yet, Loy observes, the opposition between ‘‘sex’’ and ‘‘virtue’’ (‘‘the fictitious value of woman’’) which legitimates the difference between these two roles is entirely false, for ‘‘the woman who is a poor mistress will be an incompetent mother—an inferior mentality,’’ and ‘‘there is nothing impure in sex.’’ In order to be rid of the market value of purity, Loy provocatively advocates the surgical destruction of virginity. Maternity (as well as sexual pleasure) should be the right of every woman, Loy states, and not subordinated to marriage or any other ‘‘possibly irksome and outworn alliance.’’ The only responsibility of maternity is to ‘‘the race,’’ according to Loy. Every woman ‘‘of superior intelligence’’ should produce children to counterbalance ‘‘the unfit and degenerate members of her sex.’’ Each of these children should be ‘‘the result of a definite period of psychic development in her life,’’ and procreation should thus follow ‘‘the individual lines of personal evolution.’’ Woman should free herself of the mystifications of ‘‘love,’’ ‘‘sentimentality,’’ and ‘‘jealousy,’’ and sexual union between a man and a woman ‘‘should be the expression of an easy & ample interpenetration of the male and female temperaments.’’ The most objectionable condition of woman for Loy—tantamount to enslavement—is the need to define herself by ‘‘negation,’’ as the other of man. This form of ‘‘relative impersonality’’ (the idea that a woman is a ‘‘person’’ only in relation to man) is not femininity according to Loy. In Loy’s vision, woman must have ‘‘indomitable will, irreducible courage’’ and ‘‘sound nerves.’’ Although she falls short of calling, like de Saint-Point, for the violent virilization of woman, Loy clearly endorses de Saint-Point’s vision of a ‘‘strong’’ futurist woman with the same qualities of superior intelligence, courage and daring as her male Downloaded by [University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)], [Lucia Re] at 10:34 02 August 2013 Mina Loy and the Quest for a Futurist Feminist Woman 813 equivalent. She also shares with de Saint-Point, and with Marinetti, the evolutionist and Nietzschean vision of a ‘‘superior’’ humanity, a stand which has made her rather unpopular with contemporary feminists. Loy’s polemic against the electoral illusions of reformist feminism echoes Marinetti’s statements, especially ‘‘Contro l’amore e il parlamentarismo’’ (‘‘Against Love and Parliamentarism’’), which, like Loy’s manifesto, associates political and sexual revolution. Due perhaps to a misunderstanding of Marinetti’s admittedly paradoxical and ironic position on feminism, Loy’s manifesto has also been misread. Virginia Kouidis, for example, claims that Loy’s rejection of sexual equality is a challenge to the futurist program, which endorsed suffragism.47 But in fact Loy totally endorsed the radical futurist program and, like Marinetti and de Saint-Point, demystified the notion of equality as a bourgeois and reformist illusion. It was not by gaining the vote in the current parliamentary system that women would change their condition, Marinetti maintained in ‘‘Against Love and Parliamentarism,’’ but by carrying out a more radical transformation and dismantling of the cultural practices and modes of thinking of which the current political system was the direct expression. However, since most women—brainwashed by the myths of feminine virtue and rendered culturally and intellectually inferior by centuries of subjection to the patriarchal order— seemed uninclined to such a revolution, and were bent rather on gaining the vote and entering the parliament, Marinetti sarcastically welcomed the vote for women, for it would surely lead the European parliaments towards self-destruction while simultaneously wreaking havoc on the patriarchal family, an institution which Marinetti found equally contemptible. Loy’s allusion to parasitism and to marriage as a kind of legalized and glorified prostitution is thus entirely in tune with the futurist vocabulary, as is her advocacy of a free and spontaneous sexuality. Where she marks new territory, however, is in her proud affirmation of female sexuality and maternity. Instead of the ‘‘penetration’’ of Marinetti’s ‘‘Abbasso il tango e Parsifal,’’ she advocates ‘‘easy & ample interpenetration,’’ with ‘‘interpenetration’’ being clearly an adaptation of the futurist master term ‘‘compenetrazione.’’ The phenomenon of female sexuality, or indeed of sexuality pure and simple, she claims in contrast to Marinetti, does not have to be regressive; nor does the process of childbirth have to be animalistic and therefore transcended by masculine will power (the power that generates the mechanical son in Mafarka). The intellectual and the physical can function in unison; they too can and should interpenetrate. The true futurist (r)evolution for Loy resides not in the transcendence of sexuality through mechanized man, but in the transformation of sexual codes to liberate both man and woman by ending the false opposition of feminine body vs. masculine mind. Curiously, Loy has been accused even recently by feminist critics of confusing ‘‘her intellectual needs with her sexual desires,’’48 a comment that seems to mimic the very logic that Loy set out to dislodge. In launching an attack against the regressive and restrictive attitudes to womanhood and sexuality which defined her own life until then, Loy was surely impelled by futurism. Yet she carried futurist critique even further when she implied that futurist misogyny was a thing of the past—as reactionary and regressive as the ideology that it set out to dismantle. Futurist misogyny was essentially based on the mind/body split which had saturated western metaphysics since Plato, who had been the first to relegate woman, the body, and the maternal to the inferior, animal sphere, and to exalt the mind, the masculine and love among men as belonging to the superior realm 814 LUCIA RE Downloaded by [University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)], [Lucia Re] at 10:34 02 August 2013 of true creativity and spirituality.49 Marinetti did not subscribe to the body/mind, spirit/ matter split, and in fact with futurism built an entire mythology around its elimination; this anti-woman prejudice, from Loy’s perspective, also had to go, for it was a remnant of the past. The global transformation of mentality and, in Loy’s words, ‘‘wider social regeneration’’ that futurism looked forward to, required a radical rethinking of sexuality and of sexual difference. NOTES 1. Carolyn Burke, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 156. 2. ‘‘Nous voulons glorifier la guerre – seule higiène du monde – le militarisme, le patriotisme, le geste destructeur des anarchistes, les belles idées qui tuent, e le mépris de la femme.’’ The complete ‘‘Fondation et manifeste du futurisme’’ was published in French in Le Figaro on February 20, 1909. It can now be found in F. T. Marinetti, Le futurisme, preface by Giovanni Lista (Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1980; first edition Paris: Sansot, 1911). The programmatic section had already appeared in Italian, with some interesting differences: for example ‘‘le belle idee per cui si muore’’ (‘‘the beautiful ideas for which one can die’’) in French became the more startling ‘‘les belles idées qui tuent’’ (‘‘the beautiful ideas that kill’’). The Italian version can now be found in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista (henceforth, TIF), ed. Luciano de Maria (Milan: Mondadori,1968). The passage quoted reads in the original: ‘‘Noi vogliamo glorificare la guerra – sola igiene del mondo – il militarismo, il patriottismo, il gesto distruttore dei libertari, le belle idee per cui si muore e il disprezzo della donna’’ (p. 11). The English translation (clearly based on the Italian version) is from Marinetti, Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint, trans. R. W. Flint and Arthur A. Capotelli (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), 42. 3. The novel was originally published in French by Sansot. The frontispiece has the date 1909 on it, but on the cover the date is 1910. The topos of ‘‘scorn for woman’’ remained powerful as a rhetorical category and an instrument of provocation in futurist discourse well after the First World War, when women’s participation in the movement was not only accepted but actively encouraged by Marinetti, and a substantial number of women joined the movement. See for example La morte della donna (The death of woman) (Turin: Edizioni Sindacati Artistici, 1925) and L’uomo senza sesso (The sexless man) (Turin: Edizioni Sindacati Artistici, 1927) by Fillia (Luigi Colombo), one of the most interesting exponents of second futurism (he was born in 1904). Fillia, who was also an abstract painter, a designer and a theorist of avant-garde architecture, was among the protagonists of the still little-known communistfuturist movement (Proletkult) which originated in Turin in the early 1920s. In Fillia (Catalogue of the Milan exhibition at the Centro Rizzoli, Milan: Olimpia, 1976), 19, Marzio Pallottini argues that what Fillia called the ‘‘death of woman as a sentimental value’’ represented ‘‘a clear position in favour of an ideal of liberated femininity’’ and sexual liberation for both men and women. 4. See ‘‘Il processo e l’assoluzione di Mafarka il futurista,’’ appendix to F. T. Marinetti, Distruzione: Poema futurista, trans. Decio Cinti (Milan: Edizioni di Poesia, 1911). See also Emilio Settimelli, I processi al futurismo per oltraggio al pudore: Arringhe di Salvatore Barzilai, Luigi Capuana, Innocenzo Cappa, F.T. Marinetti, Cesare Sarfatti, Renato Zavataro, seguite da una conclusione di Bruno Corra e Emilio Settimelli (Rocca San Casciano: Cappelli, 1918). For an account of the various phases of the trial, see Claudia Salaris, Marinetti: Arte e vita futurista (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1997), 91–93. On the cultural and historical context of this trial, see Bruno P. F. Wanroij, Storia del pudore: La questione sessuale in Italia 1860–1940 (Venice: Marsilio, 1990), 53–54. 5. F. R. Marinetti, Mafarka le futuriste (Paris: Sansot, 1910), 214, 216. Downloaded by [University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)], [Lucia Re] at 10:34 02 August 2013 Mina Loy and the Quest for a Futurist Feminist Woman 815 6. Readings in English of Mafarka as offensive, misogynistic and fascistic can be found in Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), Cinzia Sartini Blum, The Other Modernism: F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist Fiction of Power (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), and Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). See also Carol Diethe, ‘‘Sex and Superman: An Analysis of the Pornographic Content of Marinetti’s Mafarka le futuriste,’’ in Perspectives on Pornography: Sexuality in Film and Literature, ed. Gary Day and Clive Bloom (New York: Macmillan, 1988), 159–74. 7. In contrast to Anglo-American critics, European readers of futurism, for example Giovanni Lista and Luciano De Maria, among others, have tended to gloss over its misogynistic, racist and homophobic violence or to take it for granted. Even critic and poet Edoardo Sanguineti (a leader of the Italian neo-avant-garde), who vehemently objects to futurism on ideological and aesthetic grounds, finds its misogynistic violence unremarkable. Mario Verdone and Claudia Salaris are among the few who offer insightful and balanced comments on futurist misogyny and violence. See especially Mario Verdone, Teatro del tempo futurista (Rome: Lerici, 1969), and Claudia Salaris, Storia del futurismo (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1985). 8. Only the early contributions by Valentine de Saint-Point are routinely (if perfunctorily) mentioned: her 1912 ‘‘Manifeste de la femme futuriste’’ and the 1913 ‘‘Manifeste futuriste de la luxure,’’ with little or no regard however for the rest of her life and career. See Lucia Re, ‘‘Valentine de Saint-Point, Ricciotto Canudo, F. T. Marinetti: Eroticism, Violence and Feminism from Prewar Paris to Colonial Cairo,’’ in Quaderni d’Italianistica 24.2 (Fall 2003): 37–69. Recently there has also been considerable work published on Benedetta, including the essays in La futurista: Benedetta Cappa Marinetti, ed. Lisa Panzera (Philadelphia, PA: Moore College of Art and Design, 1988) and Franca Zoccoli, Benedetta Cappa Marinetti: L’incantesimo della luce (Milano: Selene Edizioni, 2000). Benedetta’s three novels have been reprinted in a single volume, Le forze umane: Viaggio di Gararà. Astra e il sottomarino, ed. Simona Cigliana (Rome: Edizioni dell’Altana, 1988). On Rosa Rosà, see Lucia Re, ‘‘Scrittura della metamorfosi e metamorfosi della scrittura: Rosa Rosà e il futurismo,’’ in Les FemmesEcrivains en Italie (1870–1920): ordres et libertés, ed. Emanuelle Genevois, special issue of Chroniques Italiennes, Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle 39/40 (1994): 311–27. On Enif Robert, see Cecilia Bello Minciacchi, ‘‘Lo sperimentalismo terapeutico di Enif Robert,’’ in Avanguardia 19 (2002): 75–94. In most critical literature on futurism, however, women are usually either ignored or presented, sometimes quite condescendingly, as brain-washed, masculinized, masochistic or otherwise misguided ‘‘groupies.’’ This is doubtlessly due in part to a piecemeal, incomplete knowledge, and the general unavailability of their work, as well as the lack, until recently, of reliable modern editions. Only specialized studies and anthologies deal with women futurists in some detail, and there is still very little in-depth critical or comparative work. Significant pioneering essays have been published by Claudia Salaris, who has also edited the anthology Le futuriste: Donne e letteratura d’avanguardia in Italia (1909/1944) (Milan: Edizioni delle Donne, 1982). See also Mirella Bentivoglio and Franca Zoccoli, Women Artists of Italian Futurism (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1997). Recent contributions include Silvia Contarini, La Femme futuriste: Mythe, modèles et répresentations de la femme dans la théorie e la littérature futuristes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris X, 2006), and the anthology Spirale di Dolcezza þ Serpe di fascino: Scrittrici futuriste. Antologia, ed. Cecilia Bello Minciacchi (Naples: Bibliopolis, 2007), which includes an excellent, thorough bibliography. (The latter two volumes are reviewed in this issue). 9. Unfortunately discussions in English, for example the chapter on futurism in Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), continue to give a misleading image of futurism. Nicholls disposes rather quickly of futurist misogyny and, while he acknowledges that the movement ‘‘actually included a number of women writers’’ (p. 89), he discusses none of their experimental works, while he is more generous with male futurist poets of the early period such as Enrico Cavacchioli and Ardengo Soffici, probably because their work is routinely included in Italian anthologies and textbooks. Ironically, Downloaded by [University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)], [Lucia Re] at 10:34 02 August 2013 816 LUCIA RE however, in his article ‘‘Futurism, Gender, and Theories of Postmodernity,’’ Textual Practice 3.2 (1989): 202–21, Nicholls cites Valentine de Saint-Point’s ‘‘Futurist Manifesto of Lust’’ out of context as the basis for his claim that futurism’s vision of sexual desire was postmodern ante-litteram. But Valentine’s manifesto was written to refute, not to represent the original futurist theory of sexuality as purely mechanical. Richard Humphreys’ Futurism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) mentions no women with the exception of Benedetta (named only as co-signer of the 1929 manifesto of aeropainting). The most balanced discussion of the futurist vision of women in English remains the chapter entitled ‘‘Futurism and Women,’’ in Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla, Futurism (London: Thames & Hudson, 1977), 153–64, though no women futurists are actually mentioned or discussed except for a brief allusion to Valentine de Saint-Point and the marchesa Casati. A section on women futurists is included, however, in the recent Futurism: An Anthology, ed. Christine Poggi, Lawrence Rainey, and Laura Wittman (Yale University Press, 2009). 10. Ezra Pound recognized the quality of Loy’s poetry as early as 1918 in a review devoted to her and Marianne Moore, entitled ‘‘‘Others,’’’ The Little Review 4 (March 1918): 56–58. Pound anthologized Loy’s poem ‘‘The Effectual Marriage’’ several times, and in 1932 defined it as one of the most memorable poems of the last thirty years, one which defined its epoch. She was also admired by William Carlos Williams, and her experimentalism had a determining influence on e. e. cummings, among others. Loy published mostly in small magazines such as The Little Review, Dial, Others, and Camera Work, but the intellectual influence of these publications—as was often the case for small magazines—far outweighed the number of copies published and sold. In a review published in Dial 80 ( June 1926): 496–99, Yvor Winters suggested that Loy along with Williams had the most to offer to young American poets. The relative ‘‘obscurity’’ of Loy’s work, and the lack of a public response to it, compared for example to the acclaim elicited by the work of William Carlos Williams, are attributable to the gender politics of modernism in the English-speaking world. Loy’s strong mix of technical experimentation and idiosyncratic feminism continued to be disturbing in the 1930s and 1940s, even in supposedly avant-garde circles. On the reception and critical gender framing of Loy’s work, see Samuel French Morse, ‘‘The Rediscovery of Mina Loy and the Avant-Garde,’’ Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 2 (1961): 12–19, and Carolyn Burke, ‘‘Getting Spliced: Modernism and Sexual Difference,’’ American Quarterly 39 (1987): 98–121. 11. I therefore disagree with Elizabeth Arnold, who claims that Loy was not influenced by futurism, and that her relationship with the futurist movement was only one of satirical critique of their misogyny. See Elizabeth Arnold, ‘‘Mina Loy and the Futurists,’’ Sagetrieb 8.1–2 (Spring–Fall 1989): 84–117. See also Janet Lyon, Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 148–67. Other readers, while acknowledging Loy’s futurist connection, have downplayed or misconstrued its importance. See Natalya Lusty, ‘‘Sexing the Manifesto: Mina Loy, Feminism and Futurism,’’ in Women: A Cultural Review 19.3 (November 2008): 245–60; Rob Sheffield, ‘‘Mina Loy in Too Much Too Soon: Poetry/Celebrity/Sexuality/Modernity,’’ in The Little Review 46.4 (Summer 2003): 625–35; Ellen Stauder, ‘‘On Mina Loy,’’ in Modernism and Modernity 4.3 (1997): 141–59; Laura Scuriatti, ‘‘Bodies of Discomfort: Mina Loy, the Futurists and Feminism in Italy Between the Wars,’’ in Women in Europe Between the Wars, ed. Angela Kershaw and Angela Kimyongür (London: Ashgate, 2007). Even Burke, who is the most careful interpreter of Loy’s involvement with futurism, concludes that hers was in the end only ‘‘a brush with futurism’’ (Becoming Modern, 187). Peter Nicholls links Loy’s ‘‘Feminist Manifesto’’ of 1914 to the spirit of Dada (Modernisms, 223), but Loy’s manifesto is clearly a futurist text, and pre-dates Dada by at least two years. 12. Benedetta’s fascination with surrealism is evident especially in the novel Astra e il sottomarino: Vita trasognata (Naples: Casella, 1935). Maria Ginanni published two experimental works of prose poetry in a futurist-symbolist and phenomenological vein: Montagne trasparenti (Florence: Edizioni dell’Italia Futurista, 1917), and Il poema dello spazio (Milan: Facchi, 1919). Downloaded by [University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)], [Lucia Re] at 10:34 02 August 2013 Mina Loy and the Quest for a Futurist Feminist Woman 817 13. Now in Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems, ed. Roger L. Conover (New York: The Noonday Press, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1996), 149–52. For details on this poem’s textual history and emendations, see Conover, ibid., 215; henceforth page references to this work are cited in the text. 14. Burke, Becoming Modern, 153. 15. The manifesto, first published in 1910, is now collected in Umbro Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos (New York: The Viking Press: 1973), 24–26. 16. As Griselda Pollock points out in Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art (New York: Routledge,1988), 54, while it is normal to see paintings of women’s bodies in western art, the practice of painting from a nude model—from which women were excluded for centuries—was inherently discriminatory. Although allowed, painting of male nudes by women was still considered scandalous in Italy in the early twentieth century. 17. The English translation is from the Sackville Gallery Catalogue, reproduced in Herschel B., Chipp, ed., Theories of Modern Art (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), 294–98. 18. Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 48. 19. The novel, entitled Brontolivido was never published and exists only in draft manuscript form, now at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. 20. ‘‘First Costa Visit,‘‘ in ‘‘Brontolivido,’’ Mina Loy Papers, Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 21. Burke, Becoming Modern, 157, and 174. 22. Burke, Becoming Modern, 163. 23. Marinetti, 70. For a seductive but historically rather improbable reading of the futurist attack on subjectivity in a postmodern key, see Peter Nicholls, ‘‘Futurism, Gender, and Theories of Postmodernity,’’ in Textual Practice 3.2 (1989): 203–21. Nicholls’ notion that futurism’s repudiation of the feminine derives from the feminine’s supposed association with ‘‘interiority,’’ ‘‘introversion’’ and ‘‘the inner world’’ (p. 106) in fin-de-siècle culture is especially unconvincing. On the contrary, in texts ranging from d’Annunzio to Croce to Cecchi and many others, the feminine is associated with precisely the opposite—surface sensation (and sensuality), sensory immediacy, materiality, carnal pleasure, surface and the body, in other words, rather than depth and ‘‘the spirit’’ or ‘‘soul.’’ While in d’Annunzio the ‘‘decadent’’ feminine is valorized and made a key element of the aesthete’s sensibility, Croce and the Croceans stigmatize it as shallow, weak, un-masculine and un-aesthetic. Nicholls is in the right, however, when he emphasizes the notion of speed as a key to the new futurist aesthetic. The early futurists tend to dismantle the fin-de-siècle masculine/feminine opposition by expropriating the feminine and ‘‘masculinizing it’’ through speed and the creation of an effect of fast-moving surfaces, with no time for lingering in the exploration of interiority. The destruction of syntax (which is really its compression into a short-hand, telegraphic and ‘‘brutal’’ discourse), and words-in-freedom (analogies—sometimes quite far-fetched—whose intermediate terms have been cut out for brevity) create an effect of accelerated rhythm which replaces both the slow fetishistic lingering on surface sensations and the in-depth, paralyzing exploration of psychology (e.g., Pirandello and Henry James). 24. Loy’s use of extra and blank spaces and other typographical abnormalities are characteristic of futurist poetry. Loy, however, is not usually considered a futurist poet, partly because this cosmopolitan, transnational (and yet paradoxically highly nationalistic) movement is still prevalently studied within the boundaries of single national cultures. A notable exception is Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985; second edition with a new preface, 2003). Perloff, who has written on Loy elsewhere, does not discuss her however in this volume, devoted to early futurism. See also Zbigniew Folejewski, Futurism and its Place in the Development of Modern Poetry: A Comparative Study and Anthology (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1980). For an anthology with facing English translation of 61 Italian futurist poets (including four women: Laura Serra, Maria Goretti, Dina Cucini, and Franca Maria 818 25. 26. Downloaded by [University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)], [Lucia Re] at 10:34 02 August 2013 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. LUCIA RE Corneli), see Willard Bohn, ed., Italian Futurist Poetry (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2005). Alfred Kreymborg, Troubadour: An Autobiography (1925), cited by Conover in Loy, Baedeker, 188. Alfred Kreymborg, Our Singing Strength (1929), cited by Conover in Loy, Baedeker, 189. See also Burke, Becoming Modern, 169–70; 190–91, and, especially, 195–208. See Stein’s hilarious prose poem about Marinetti, entitled ‘‘Marry Nettie,’’ in Painted Lace (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955), 42–48. See, for example, Aimee L. Pozorski, ‘‘Eugenicist Mistress & Ethnic Mother: Mina Loy and Futurism, 1913–1917,’’ in MELUS 30 (2005): 41–69, and Lara Vetter, ‘‘Theories of Spiritual Evolution, Christian Science, and the ‘‘Cosmopolitan Jew’’: Mina Loy and American Identity,’’ Journal of Modern Literature 32 (2007): 47–63. A more nuanced view may be found in Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 52–80, and Elisabeth Frost, The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2003), 29–64. In Italy, the spurious concept of ‘‘race’’ elaborated in the nineteenth century especially by Cesare Lombroso, followed by Giuseppe Sergi and the Lombrosian school of anthropology, was invoked often after the unification, initially to differentiate between the superior, more ‘‘civilized’’ and wealthier North and the more ‘‘barbaric,’’ poor and primitive South, and then, with the belated rise of colonialism and the conquest of Libya in 1911, it was used increasingly to create a comprehensive, all-encompassing and hybrid imaginary Italian or Italic or, sometime Latin razza, in order to foster a sense of national collective identity among ‘‘Italians’’ (which had previously been very weak or non-existent). An early, utopian version of eugenics based on the supposed benefits of mixed race breeding was favored in his work by the hugely influential Lombroso. For Lombroso, who was Jewish, race mixing, in a manner similar to the benefits of cross-fertilization in plants, improved the ‘‘Italian stock.’’ On the question of race and racism in Italy, see Alberto Burgio, ed., Nel nome della razza: Il razzismo nella storia d’Italia 1870–1944 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999). See Burke’s insightful reading of these poems in Becoming Modern, 198–200. In Marinetti, born and raised in Egypt and proud of being suckled by a Sudanese nurse (as affirmed in the 1909 ‘‘Founding and Manifesto’’) and thus of having absorbed some desirable African ‘‘primitiveness,’’ and an enthusiastic promoter of Neapolitan culture and of the Italian South, the notion of ‘‘genialità’’ largely prevailed over any racialist prejudice, and ‘‘race’’ for him meant simply ‘‘a nation or people.’’ Thus he spoke of ‘‘l’irriducibile antipatia che divide tutte le razze dall’indigesta razza tedesca’’ (‘‘The irreducible antipathy that separates all races from the indigestible German race,’’ TIF 291), and blamed Nietzsche for not hating the German race enough. In ‘‘Nascita di un’estetica futurista’’ (‘‘Birth of a Futurist Aesthetic,’’ 1915, TIF 314), he wrote: ‘‘Nei prossimi inevitabili conflitti dei popoli, vincerà quello che avrà la più profonda coscienza di questa differenza. Vincerà il popolo più geniale, più elastico, più agile, più dimentico, più futurista, e quindi più ricco’’ (‘‘In the forthcoming inevitable clashes among peoples, the one that will have the deepest conscience of this difference will prevail. The people with most genius will prevail: the most elastic, agile, and oblivious, the most futurist people, and thus, the richest’’). Although otherwise a fascist enthusiast after 1922, Marinetti did not approve of Mussolini’s anti-Semitic campaign in the 1930s and his attempts to import the Nazi degenerate art campaign into Italy. See Claudia Salaris, Artecrazia: L’avanguardia futurista negli anni del fascismo (Florence: La nuova Italia, 1997). Burke, Becoming Modern, 192. The dialogue was never published. Burke, Becoming Modern, 180. Letter to Carl Van Vechten, cited by Conover, in Loy, Baedeker, 179. See also Burke, Becoming Modern, 187. Letter to Mabel Dodge Luhan, cited by Conover in Loy, Baedeker, 179. Burke, Becoming Modern, 189. On Loy’s creative use of fashion as a symbolic system, see Susan E. Dunn, ‘‘Fashion Victims: Mina Loy’s travesties,’’ in Stanford Humanities Review 7 (1999) http://www.stanford.edu/ Mina Loy and the Quest for a Futurist Feminist Woman Downloaded by [University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)], [Lucia Re] at 10:34 02 August 2013 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 819 group/SHR/7-1/html/dunn.html. Unfortunately, Dunn does not discuss Loy’s connection to the futurist vision of fashion. See especially the essay on the poet Ada Negri, first published in Croce’s journal La critica 4.1 (1906): 413–30, and then reproduced in all the expanded editions and reprints of La letteratura della Nuova Italia (1914–1940), 6 vols. (first edition, in 4 vols., Bari: Laterza, 1914). In this influential essay, Croce claims that excessive emotionalism, lack of rational and conceptual rigor, and lack of artistic labor (‘‘mancanza di elaborazione artistica’’) were most particularly a ‘‘difetto femminile’’ (‘‘feminine flaw’’). For Croce it was precisely woman’s instinctual nature, her stupendous and all-consuming ability to generate a child, that prevented her from successfully giving birth to a ‘‘fully realized aesthetic work.’’ Diotima, Mettere al mondo il mondo: Oggetto e oggettività alla luce della differenza sessuale (Milan: La Tartaruga, 1990), in particular the essay by Adriana Cavarero, ‘‘Dire la nascita,’’ 93–121. The painting was shown at the 1936 Venice Biennale. See Il futurismo attraverso la Toscana (exhibition catalogue), ed. Enrico Crispolti (Leghorn: Silvana Editoriale, 2000), 144. This catalogue reproduces several of Mori’s works. See Virginia M. Kouidis, Mina Loy: American Modernist Poet (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), and Carolyn Burke, ‘‘The New Poetry and the New Woman: Mina Loy,’’ in Coming to Light: American Women Poets of the Twentieth Century, ed. Diane Middlebrook and Marilyn Yalom (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1985), 37–57. Quoted in Burke, Becoming Modern, 157. See Burke, Becoming Modern, 162–63. See especially ‘‘Lions’ Jaws’’ (c. 1919), published in The Little Review (Sept.–Dec. 1920), now in Loy, Baedeker, 46–50. The poem is particularly shrewd in identifying Marinetti’s ‘‘anxiety of influence’’ vis-à-vis Gabriele D’Annunzio. About this anxiety or rather ‘‘mimetic rivalry,’’ see Pierpaolo Antonello, ‘‘On an Airfield in Montichiari, Near Brescia. Staging Rivalry through Technology: Marinetti and D’Annunzio,’’ Stanford Humanities Review 7 (1999), http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/7-1/html/antonello.html Letter to Carl Van Vechten, cited by Conover in Loy, Baedeker, 180–81. The text—which Loy considered still a draft—was sent to Mabel Dodge for comment. The version of the manifesto in the 1982 edition of Loy’s poems contained several errors and mistranscriptions which were pointed out by Loy scholar Rachel Blau DuPlessis and corrected in the new edition. See Conover, in Loy, Baedeker, 216–17. See Conover in Loy, Baedeker, 216, and, for a feminist reading, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, ‘‘Seismic Orgasm: Sexual Intercourse, Gender Narratives, and Lyric Ideology in Mina Loy,’’ in Ralph Cohen, ed., Studies in Historical Change (Charlottesville,VI: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 264–91. The ‘‘Manifesto of Futurist Woman,’’ written in both an Italian and a French version and performed by Valentine de Saint-Point in her Paris atelier on March 25, 1912, was published along with the later ‘‘Futurist Manifesto of Lust,’’ dated January 11, 1913 in the collective volume Manifesti del futurismo by the publisher of the journal Lacerba in 1914, and widely circulated and translated into several languages. Kouidis, Mina Loy, 29–30. Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900–1940 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986), 384. Luce Irigaray has written by now classic studies of Platonic prejudice in western thought, among which are Speculum de l’autre femme (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1974), especially part two, on Plato’s ‘‘Hystera,’’ and Ethique de la différence sexuelle (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1984). For a fascinating feminist discussion of Plato from this point of view, see also Adriana Cavarero, Nonostante Platone (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1990); In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy, trans. Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio and Áine O’Healy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995).