To what extent do the formal innovations of female modernist
poets articulate their engagement with questions of gender and/
or sexuality?
Stein and Loy ignite the flames between the ‘shuttle cock’ and the ‘battle door’
(X), radically setting up the foundations for a verbal, compositional war of the
battle of the sexes. Loy claims that ‘woman is the equal of man’ 1 that ‘men and
women are enemies’2 thus every woman ‘must destroy…the desire to be loved.’ 3
‘The only point at which the interests of the sexes merge—is the sexual
embrace.’4 This period coined ‘homosexuality’ and ‘feminism’, as there was an
enormous interest in defining and blurring boundaries between ‘masculinity’ and
‘femininity’. This essay will examine the innovations in écriture feminine and its
new mode of composition, the transfiguring of syntax and grammar and the
duplicitous connotations of language. It will examine how the fight for feminism,
the renaissance of ‘lesbianism,’ and the failed heterosexual relations have led
Loy and Stein to mirror this in Songs to Joannes and Tender Buttons.
The Feminist Manifesto uses composition as a means to attract feminists.
The use of capitalisation, bold larger fonts, and under-lining places prominence
on certain messages. These compositional techniques are applied when Loy
poses specific questions, ‘Is that all you want?’ Loy radicalises women’s demand
for independence through mise-en-page especially through the use of large
typefaces in reference to ‘women, wrench, reform and absolute demolition.’ She
1 Mary Ann Caws. "Manifesto: A Century of Isms" (Nebraska: University of
Nebraska Press, 2001) p.611
2 Ibid.,p.612
3 Ibid.,p.613
4 Ibid.,p.612
,advocates that she is destroying the gender gap. Just as Marinetti’s ‘Futurist
Manifesto’ stated that ‘we want to demolish…feminism’ 5, likewise Loy launches
her satiric attack that the females should strive for ‘absolute demolition’ 6 of
patriarchy.
Songs uses form supremely to comment upon sexuality. The pseudo-
narrative collage-like structure aims to reflect the difficulties that Loy faced in
her loveless marriages. The enjambment and juxtaposition of images reflects the
altering atmosphere and ambience of her sexual life. It seeks to reflect ‘seismic
orgasm’ (XXIX), as the narrative plots follow the basic movements of sexual
acts.7 Loy further modifies syntax by using continuous elliptical hyphens showing
the poem as a montage of truncated speech. The words signify and perpetuate
separation. Loy has a frantic elliptical style avoiding the employment of
punctuation to mark stops or line breaks. There is a fracturing of syntax, stop-
start rhythms, and oscillations in diction. Quartermain has seen the Songs to be
at once a ‘fragment and a whole’ 8, subsequently Songs attack romanticised
sexuality as a means of subjugating women. Loy’s radical approach to sexual
activity and gender is equally mirrored in her radical departure from the
conventions of poetic form, fragments and semantic choice. Her writing is central
to femininity with its patent discord and fracture.
5 Lawrence Rainey. "Futurism an Anthology" (Connecticut: Yale University, 2009)
p.51
6 Caws.,p.611
7 Rachel Blau, DuPlessis. “Seismic Orgasm”: Sexual Intercourse and Narrative
Meaning in Mina Loy’. Ed. Maeera Schreiber and Keith Tuma. (Maine: National
Poetry Foundation, 1998) p. 46
8 Peter, Quartermain. “The Tattle of Tongueplay” (Orono, ME: National Poetry
Foundation, 1998), p.77
, Another feature of composition that Loy constantly employs is the use of
compound words as a means to deliberately fuse words. As a result of her failed
relationship with Papini, Loy finds it feasible that words should coerce by fusing,
imitating her desire for the union of sexual intercourse. Two standard words ‘Pig-
Cupid’ (I) which do not make sense together are forced by Loy into one being,
kept intact by a hyphen. However Loy divides words associated with the
overseas to show her disentanglement from them. Loy partitions ‘aspirations’ in
to ‘aspira tions.’ (XIII) The prefix ‘aspira’ illustrates Italian locution. Loy is
cryptically obscuring sex by veiling it in Italian lexicology; the word ‘aspira’
denoting ‘suck’ in Italian, invoking oral sex. This excessive use of enjambment
vulgarises the content by disrupting the rhythm of the words, as words move
along the page.
The fissure in Loy and Papini’s relationship is shown through Loy’s
innovative use of form. The break-up of the ‘me’ and ‘you’ is shown in XIV, as the
‘me’ and ‘you’ is first connected but then divorced from each other with the
presence of the hyphens. Loy further utilises white spacing to reflect on the
blankness of her failed relationship. She justifies words creating a sense of
rupture. The words cannot become one, imitating how Loy and Papini cannot
become one. White space could be Loy’s innovative way of replacing
punctuation. The white space acts as a frame for the text, allowing for flexibility
acting as caesurae. Used for aesthetic composition, the white space creates a
sense of incompleteness, invoking emptiness and void. Synaesthetic collapse is
shown in the white imagery which prevails in the Songs to reverse meaning.
‘Wickedness of pain’ (XXIII) is shown in whiteness, as her ‘words [are] all white’
(XXVIII); therefore this reveals a schizophrenic slippery nature of language,
suggesting that the white spaces are hidden meanings of ‘pain.’ White comes to
mean its opposite ‘where there is nothing to see.’ (XXVIII) It is the imagined state
