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The European Legacy: Toward New

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Mina Loy and the Quest for a Futurist

Feminist Woman

Lucia Re aa University of California, Los Angeles, 212 Royce Hall, LosAngeles, California 90095-1535, USAPublished online: 25 Nov 2009.

To cite this article: Lucia Re (2009) Mina Loy and the Quest for a Futurist Feminist Woman, TheEuropean Legacy: Toward New Paradigms, 14:7, 799-819, DOI: 10.1080/10848770903363896

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The European Legacy, Vol. 14, No. 7, pp. 799–819, 2009

Mina Loy and the Quest for aFuturist Feminist Woman

LUCIA RE

ABSTRACT Interpreters of futurism are often fascinated by its most violent and misogynistic aspects, ignoringits other sides, and the liberatory effect that its attack on bourgeois values had on a considerable numberof women. Yet one of the elements which make the complexity of futurism evident is the substantialparticipation of women in it. Valentine de Saint-Point, Enif Robert, Maria Ginanni, Irma Valeria, RosaRosa, and Benedetta (Marinetti’s wife) were inspired by its groundbreaking, transgressive energy. As futuristwriters 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 theexperimental writers of the twentieth century, was inspired by futurism to seek her personal and intellectualliberation as a futurist-feminist woman, and started out her literary career essentially as a futurist poet andiconoclast. Her work, although written in English (a language that Marinetti did not know), is some of the bestand 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 hadbeen suffering from a spiritual and psychological crisis, wrote that she felt ‘‘as if she hadbenefited by a fortnight at the seashore.’’1 Yet from its inception in 1909 Italian futurismdeployed a language marked by the insistent use of misogynistic images, and it madea certain kind of misogyny (‘‘mepris de la femme’’ or ‘‘disprezzo della donna,’’ i.e. ‘‘scornfor woman’’) the very basis of its supposed novelty and transgressiveness: ‘‘We willglorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gestureof freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.’’2 Like manyother rhetorical strategies adopted by futurism and particularly by Marinetti, however, theexaggerated anti-woman discourse and the violent virilism of the first futurist texts—especially the novel Mafarka le futuriste and the early manifestos—were principallyintended as means to attract attention, to ‘‘shake up things’’; in short, to outrage andscandalize.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

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for the provocative use of disturbing, sexually charged and violent discourse, which hascontinued to characterize a certain type of avant-garde art up to, for example, RobertMapplethorpe’s controversial work. Mafarka, for which Marinetti was charged withobscenity (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 ledeventually to a suspended sentence.4 The novel, however, whose eponymous heroMafarka, the warrior king of the African city of Tell-el-Kibir, dreams of generatinga 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 scandaland 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 earlyas well as later texts cannot be condoned or ignored, but it needs to be understood inits cultural and historical context. The regressively violent, protofascist and then fascistaspects of futurism coexist and often conflict in paradoxical and ironic ways withemancipatory and liberating impulses and tendencies that continued to surface and findexpression in futurist art and writing well after the First World War.7 Critical interpretersof Italian futurism, especially in the English-speaking world, have tended to be fascinatedby 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 andtraditional moralistic and repressive values had on a considerable number of women ofvarious 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, IrmaValeria, the Lithuanian-born Eva Khun, and the Austrian emigree Rosa Rosa (Edythvon Haynau) to Marinetti’s wife, Benedetta, these women, often barely mentionedin comprehensive discussions of futurism, were inspired by its groundbreaking,iconoclastic energy. As futurist writers and artists they contributed significantly to alterand enrich the movement and its language, countering its misogyny, and taking futurismin different creative directions, often disregarding Marinetti’s directives.8 It is thereforerather misleading and historically narrow to associate Italian futurism tout court with themisogynistic violence of its origins, for in its long and complex history futurism’srelationship with women and its construction of ‘‘the feminine’’ went through severaldifferent phases, although the discourse concerning gender and the relation betweenthe sexes remained a fundamental ground on which futurism insistently displayed its‘‘difference’’ and staked its importance as an avant-garde movement.9 Certainly futurismwas the first literary or aesthetic movement in Italy actively to encourage the participationof women, historically excluded from the traditionally masculinist realm of culturalproduction.

MINA LOY AND FUTURIST ICONOCLASM: THE LEAP

TOWARDS A NEW POETICS

It is one of the many ironies of the history of futurism’s relationship with womenthat some of the earliest futurist texts written by a woman, Mina Loy, were not in Italian

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but in English, a language that Marinetti did not know. These texts have long beenignored in discussions of futurism, even though Loy was arguably one of the greatestand 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 restoredmost 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, satiricalwit, and especially her constant urge to change and to reinvent herself, owed a lotto the futurist ‘‘spirit’’ which shaped her entire approach to life and art.11 The urge toexperiment with the juxtaposition of different avant-garde modes, such as futurismand surrealism, and even to hybridize them in heretical new ways (which includedan 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-gardemovement founded by Marinetti, was the 1914 ‘‘Aphorisms on Futurism,’’ whichappeared in Alfred Stieglitz’s ‘‘epochal’’ quarterly, Camera Work.13 Written by using thecharacteristically synthetic form, bold capitals, expressive typography and performativelanguage of the futurist manifesto and free-word poetry, the poem exudes the enthusiasmof the neophyte: ‘‘DIE in the Past / Live in the Future. THE velocity of velocities arrivesin starting’’—declare the opening lines (Baedeker, 149). But the poem also reverberateswith personal allusions, as if Loy were speaking to her own rejuvenated self as well asto the reader: ‘‘BUT the Future is only dark from outside. / Leap into it—and itEXPLODES with Light.’’ Loy welcomed futurism as an invitation to creativity and toa positive, affirmative view of life’s connection with art: ‘‘THE futurist must leap fromaffirmative to affirmative, ignoring intermittent negations—must spring from steppingstone to stone of creative explorations; without slipping back into the turbidstream of accepted facts.’’ No irony is detectable in these aphorisms yet; only the joyof discovery.

Loy, who had started out as a figurative painter in the Liberty style and hadsuccessfully exhibited her work in London in 1912, seems to have first encounteredfuturist themes and images through the work of Wyndham Lewis, whose vigoroussemiabstractions and hard-edged geometrical figures propelled explosively though spaceimpressed her a great deal when she saw his work at the second Post-Impressionistexhibition in London. Lewis, however, soon turned away from futurist influences andfrom what he viewed as the excessive emphasis of futurism on movement, which inhis view produced blurring, confusion, and indistinct, weak images, while—evenin producing effects of explosive violence—he opted for a more ‘‘masculine’’ structuralclarity and precision of contours. The quintessentially futurist notions of movement andof 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 diagnosedas suffering from the female malady of the time, neurasthenia, and was trying to extricateherself from her marriage to the painter Stephen Haweis, found futurism therapeutic andsexually liberating and exhilarating. As Carolyn Burke reports, she and Frances Stevensstudied the futurist manifestos and catalogues as if they were news from the front.14

Although the futurists themselves may have found this surprising, the ‘‘TechnicalManifesto of Futurist Painting’’ had unforeseen feminist implications. It called not only

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for the abolition of mimetic representation and its replacement by the rendering ofmovement 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 modelwas an act of ‘‘mental cowardice.’’ The futurists concluded their manifesto by demandingfor ten years the total suppression of the nude in painting.15

The nude, as feminist scholarship has demonstrated, served as the principal meansfor the objectification and immobilization of woman by the male gaze in the westernpictorial 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 specializedin 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 themaker 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) andLa strada entra nella casa (The Street Enters the House) seemed suddenly to mobilizewoman’s own gaze. The introduction to the illustrated catalogue of the 1912 exhibitionof futurist painting that opened at Berneheim-Jeune in Paris and circulated to Londonand various other European countries presented La strada entra nella casa as a quintessentialexample of the new futurist art.17 This surprising gender inversion of the traditionalgaze structure of western painting was unmatched by other avant-garde movementsat the time. Even Picasso and Duchamp, while decomposing perspective andrevolutionizing representation, were still painting nudes and looking through animplicitly masculine gaze. (I am thinking in particular of Picasso’s cubist nudes painted in1909, and of Duchamp’s famous Nu descendant un escalier [Nude Descending a Staircase] of1912.) Just as in their iconoclastic exaltation of intuition, primitivism, dis-order,bodily sensations, materiality and sexuality, the futurists had unwittingly appropriateda ‘‘feminine’’ realm and deprived it of its negative connotations, so now, in abolishingthe nude and making the viewer look as if through a woman’s eyes, they wereeffectively dismantling one of the principal aesthetic and visual codes of westernpatriarchal culture.

But the futurist revolution was not limited to gender politics, i.e., the provocativerefashioning of the cultural and pragmatic relation between the sexes, and their culturalrepresentations. The further political implications of futurist dynamism and activismwere spelled out in the 1912 catalogue by commenting on some of the other paintingsin the exhibition, which included explicitly incendiary works such as Russolo’s The Revoltand Boccioni’s Riot in the Galleria. The catalogue essay (which was signed by Boccioni,Carra, 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 ‘‘participatein the action.’’18

Frances Stevens found these ideas so exciting that she began translating themanifestos, and with Mina Loy she discussed the meaning of futurist dynamism.Both frequented the Caffe delle Giubbe Rosse in Florence, the hangout of avant-gardepainters and writers at the time. The painters Ardengo Soffici and Carlo Carra (whowas in love with Loy and even proposed to her at one point) began to turn up on theCosta San Giorgio, where the two women lived, trying to enlist Frances in the futuristmovement. Eventually they brought Marinetti with them to meet Frances, but Marinetti

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immediately turned to the older Loy and asked her to give herself to him. It was,according to Loy, a coup de theatre for the benefit of his comrades. However, they soonbecame involved in a thrilling relationship, a kind of sex war with virtuoso verbalcombat and repeated reciprocal stabs. During her liaison with Marinetti, which lasted afew intense months and ended in 1915, Loy began to write a roman a clef in whichshe recorded their conversations, and took note especially of the competitivenessand reciprocal resentment of Marinetti and Papini.19 Loy chided Marinetti for hispretentiousness while he tried to win her over to un-romantic, energizing andstrengthening futurist love, criticizing her for being ‘‘too mystical.’’ ‘‘His tactile adroitnessequaled his conversational celerity,’’ she wrote.20 The liaison eventually developedin 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 onlywoman in his life. Mina, who found him ‘‘one of the most satisfying personalities I evercame in contact with,’’ fantasized about having a child of his.21

In November 1913, Frances and Mina were able to see the exhibition of futuristpainting in Florence, a huge succes de scandale. The following month she attended the seratafuturista 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 workat the Sprovieri Gallery, she started painting futurist paintings to be exhibited in Romeand feeling like she was entering a Vita Nuova.22 Unfortunately, all traces of Loy’spaintings from this period seem to have been lost. But what propelled Loy into her newlife was writing rather than painting.

MINA LOY, FUTURIST POET

Boccioni’s paintings La strada entra nella casa and Visioni simultanee, and the futuristfascination with the multi-sensory excitement of urban street life, along with Marinetti’s1912 ‘‘Manifesto Tecnico della letteratura futurista’’ (‘‘Technical Manifesto of FuturistLiterature’’), the 1913 ‘‘Distruzione della Sintassi Immaginazione senza fili Parole inLiberta’’ (‘‘Destruction of Syntax Imagination Without Strings Words in Freedom’’) andthe 1914 ‘‘Lo splendore geometrico e meccanico e la sensibilita numerica’’ (‘‘Geometricand Mechanical Splendor and the Numerical Sensibility’’) inspired one of her moreevocative and visually vivid, painterly futurist poems, ‘‘The Costa San Giorgio’’ (Baedeker10-12) probably written in the summer of 1914.

‘‘OUT / Onto the middle of the street,’’ are the closing lines and the culminationof this poem, typically futurist in its ‘‘telegraphic’’ and synthetic rendering of themultiple, intersecting and overlapping sensations, sounds, images, smells, even the tasteand flavors of a street in Florence. The sensory experience is conveyed with characteristicfuturist playfulness, through onomatopoeia, fragmented syntax, lack of punctuation, andexpressive spacing. Loy was, it seems, an even more enthusiastic interpreter of the‘‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Poetry’’ than Marinetti himself, and a brilliantpractitioner of its radical poetics. There is no ‘‘I’’ in this poem, and no lyric love orsentiments; only an ironic ‘‘We English’’ at the beginning, and then the juxtaposition—reminiscent of montage and collage—of sensations and observations gathered from

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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 blotOn the messinessOf the passionate Italian life-trafficThrobbing the street up steepUp up to the portaCulminatingIn the stained frescoes of the dragon-slayer

The hips of women swayAmong the crawling children they produceAnd the church hits the barracksWhereThe greyness of marching menFalls through the greyness of stone

Oranges half-rotten are sold at reductionHoarsely advertised as broken headsBROKEN HEADS and the barberHas an imitation mirrorAnd Mary preserve our mistresses from seeing us as we see

ourselvesShavingICE CREAMLicking is larger than mouthsBoots than feetSlip Slap and the string draggingAnd the angle of the sunCuts the whole lot in half

Besides the visual vocabulary of Boccioni’s synthetic dynamism, this poem surelyevokes, more than the violent exuberance of Marinetti’s own words in freedom, thegentler playfulness of Palazzeschi’s poetry. Yet the specific influence of Marinetti is alsoclear. In the manifestos that Loy read so intently, Marinetti advocated the replacementof the traditional lyric self with an ‘‘io mutevole’’ (‘‘a mutable I’’) and ‘‘coscienzemolteplici e simultanee in uno stesso individuo’’ (‘‘multiple simultaneous consciousnesseswithin the same individual’’), freed from the constrictions of syntax. This implied,essentially, a dismantling of the traditional bourgeois sense of self and identity as alinguistic construction. It meant abandoning the idea of a unified, coherent and constantsubjectivity. This ‘‘crisis of consciousness’’ in many ways was nothing new. In Italy,for example, it already permeated modernist thought and writing through the workof Luigi Pirandello, whose Il fu Mattia Pascal (The Late Mattia Pascal) was publishedin 1904. But while Pirandello and others mourned the loss of the sense of a unifiedsubjectivity, futurism celebrated this same loss and joyfully made it the start of a newaesthetic.

The new, multiplied subjectivity fostered by modernity would be stronger,not weaker; it would allow for ‘‘multiform emotional perspectives’’ and would intuitively

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link its sensations with the entire universe.23 Loy, who had been struggling with whatdoctors 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 andinappropriate. Loy found that futurism suddenly made her feel alive again, possessed bythe desire to paint and to write. Futurism, with its call for art as an intensification of life,an art that ‘‘in fretta vi gettera affannosamente nei nervi le sue sensazioni visive, auditive,olfattive, secondo la loro corrente incalzante’’ (‘‘will throw rapidly and breathlessly ontoyour 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 rightfor women like her at the time. Futurism provided Loy with a new, exuberant ethicsof life, and this is largely what attracted her and several other women to the futuristmovement. In her 1919 novel, Un ventre di donna (The Womb of a Woman), the Italianactress Enif Robert describes her own conversion to futurism in similar terms, as alife-restoring therapy and a rebirth into a new life filled with creativity, sensual joy andself-confidence. Futurism allowed Loy to see ‘‘the crisis of consciousness’’ as the positivedismantling of an obsolete form of identity: ‘‘TODAY is the crisis of consciousness,’’ sheannounced triumphantly in her ‘‘Aphorisms on Futurism,’’ ‘‘LET the Universe flow intoyour 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 someof Loy’s best poetry, and some of the best and most original poetry of all of futurism.24

Spawn of FantasiesSilting the appraisablePig Cupid his rosy snoutRooting erotic garbage‘‘Once Upon a Time’’Pulls a weed white star-toppedAmong wild oats sown in mucous-membrane

I would an eye in a Bengal lightEternity in a sky-rocketConstellations in an oceanWhose rivers run no fresherThan a trickle of saliva

These are suspect places

I must live in my lanternTrimming subliminal flickerVirginal to the bellowsOf Experience.

Coloured glass

Loy had learned the futurist art of outrage well. The publication of the first four sectionsof ‘‘Songs of Joannes’’ in the inaugural issue of Others: A Magazine of New Verse ( July1915) under the title of ‘‘Love Songs,’’ the first of which is quoted above, helped to

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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 eliminationof punctuation marks and the audacious spacing of her lines.’’ 25 Her deployment oftypically futurist devices such as mixed lower and upper case letters, blank spacesand dashes instead of punctuation, and montage-like juxtapositions was as scandalousas 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 secretsof sex was denounced as nothing less than lewd . . .. To reduce eroticism to the sty wasan 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’swork ‘‘pure pornography.’’ Others considered her poetic challenge to form a perniciousequivalent 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 twoof her most memorable lines) (Baedeker, 62). As influenced and even inspired by futurismas these poems are, they also bear the traces of a strong English-language tradition ofwomen poets that Loy read and admired, especially Emily Dickinson, whose condensedspatiality (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 useof rhythmic recurrence (which Marinetti thought excessively fetishistic) also seem tohave influenced her. Loy was among the earliest readers and admirers of Stein, whoseThree Lives came out in 1909, and Tender Buttons in 1914. (Futurism may in turn havealso influenced Stein’s experimentation with language and punctuation, although nospecific 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 shesoon learned to turn the futurists’ own weapons against them. This was perhaps the mostconsequential and rigorous way for a woman to be a futurist. From the beginning Loyhad been uneasy about the misogynist rhetoric of futurism, even though, as pointed outby Conover, Marinetti’s misogyny was more ‘‘editorially than behaviorally conspicuous’’(Baedeker, 180). Loy felt that Marinetti’s claim that futurism did not scorn exceptionalintellectual women (donne di genio) like her was a trap. ‘‘Songs of Joannes’’ containsa poem that is a feminist critique of the misogynist evolutionist scenario which subtendedMafarka:

Evolution fall foul ofSexual equalityPrettily miscalculateSimilitude

Unnatural selectionBreed such sons and daughtersAs shall jibber at each other

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Uninterpretable cryptonymsUnder the moon(Baedeker, 65)

It should be noted, however, that Loy’s objections are not to the evolutionist scenarioper se, but rather to its sexual bias, of which she stigmatizes the absurdity. Superiorbeings could not be created by superior men alone. In taking a position which wassimultaneously (and paradoxically) Nietzschean and feminist, Loy was, perhapsunknowingly, close to her Italian contemporary, the writer Sibilla Aleramo, as wellas 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 towomen in general, and however close they may have felt in particular to women fromthe less advantaged social classes, still pursued the ideal of self-differentiation and heroismof a cultivated and superior elite, whose will power, intelligence, and vision would serveas 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 bevery popular in Europe and in the United States at the time. Loy, who was born inEngland and was part Hungarian-Jewish, advocated a kind of feminist eugenic practicegrounded in the benefits of mixed race breeding. This is certainly one of her mostcontroversial and discussed aspects.28

Yet Loy, as Carolyn Burke has shown, developed many of her feminist insights intothe patriarchal oppression of women by watching sympathetically the lives of her lowermiddle-class and lower-class female neighbors in Florence. She gradually became awareof the dismal oppression of women in Italy, and explicitly thematized it in some of herpoems.29 (She seems, on the other hand, to have had little or no contact with womenintellectuals 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 andparadoxical expression constituted a ‘‘proletariat’’ of their own and would lead the onlyauthentic revolution to come.30 In the summer of 1916, shortly before her departurefor New York, when her affair with Marinetti was already over, she boasted to Carl vanVechten that Marinetti had called her a ‘‘genius’’ after she had taken the pleasureof 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 buteven after the end of the affair she wrote: ‘‘I am indebted to [FTM] for twenty yearsadded to my life from mere contact with his exuberant personality.’’32 In the 1912technical manifesto, Marinetti had spelled out the need to abolish the ‘‘I’’ in literaturein order to replace it with the immediate rendering of physical perceptions and joyful,irreverent and a-logical analogies, violently yoking together the most disparate realmsof the physical and mental world. He had also provided his own war-inspired word-in-freedom poem as an example. The ‘‘I’’ was to be infinitely multiplied, scattered andrejuvenated as if through waves of electrical energy, and the experience and lyricalrendering of war was the best way to do this. War, the almost sexual ecstasy of violentexplosions celebrated in Zang Tumb Tuum, was hailed by Marinetti as the ultimatearena for this joyful reforging of a multiplied self. Loy fully embraced Marinetti’s

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enthusiasm for the war. Like Marinetti, she had the sensation that war was somehowan aphrodisiac. In her letters written while she was a volunteer nurse for the Red Crossin Florence, she (like Enif Robert would also do, among others) expressed envy foryoung male soldiers going to the front. ‘‘My masculine side longs for war,’’ she confessedto a friend. She had become a nurse in a surgical hospital for entirely unsentimentalreasons, ‘‘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 poemsshe could have written about a battlefield. Like a number of later women futurists, shefelt masculinized, although as one of the very first of these women to experience thissensation she felt strange and unique, suspecting that she was ‘‘the only female who hasreacted to it [FTM’s energy]—exactly the way men do. Of course being the most femalething extant—I’m somewhat masculine.’’34 It was part of the unsettling irony and gendertrouble generated by futurism and the war for futurist men to cross over into a ‘‘feminineterritory’’ and attempt to expropriate it, while women were pressed in the oppositedirection 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. Loywas repeatedly censored by critics, including the influential Amy Lowell, who threatenedto withdraw support from Others because of ‘‘Love Songs.’’ Loy’s husband wrote fromNew 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 andher life, even though they were separated and she had complete responsibility for thechildren. He repeatedly refused to grant her a divorce. Loy had difficulties publishingand was strapped for money. She began selling her belongings during the war andresumed her career as a fashion designer in order make ends meet (after all, fashion-designwas 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’’ andmasculinized, she wrote a poem, ‘‘Parturition’’ (Baedeker 4-8) about a quintessentiallyfemale experience, that of giving birth to a child. This was the same experience thatin Mafarka Marinetti had wished both to expropriate and to eradicate, and that Croce hadpointed to as the insurmountable obstacle to female literary creativity.37 When shewrote 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 whichinspired her to write about the experience of childbirth. And, like Benedetta, she cameto think of her children as works of art. The notions that inform Loy’s poem of a selfextending its boundaries through physical sensation (‘‘I am the centre / Of a circle ofpain / Exceeding its boundaries in every direction’’), a self that is doubled and thusmultiplied, and a body whose energy, perceptions and nerve vibrations (‘‘On infinitelyprolonged nerve-vibrations’’) place it in contact with an entire universe of matter, arecentral to the futurist ethos. Indeed, more than any of her more explicit later feministpolemics against futurist misogyny, this poem vividly discloses how much of futurismis in effect an attempt to co-opt and expropriate a female and feminine territory.

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The life-giving, energizing power of the ‘‘cosmically connected’’ maternal female body,suggestively called by contemporary feminist thinkers of the Italian Diotima group theability to ‘‘mettere al mondo il mondo’’ (‘‘give birth to the world’’),38 is the ultimateobject of a deeply-rooted envy which secretly motivates the futurist urge (evident inworks ranging from Mafarka to Boccioni’s ‘‘Materia’’ and beyond) to supplant orincorporate the power of the mater.

The ‘‘feminine’’ that Loy’s ‘‘Parturition’’ foregrounds, however is not justthe corporeal, nor is hers a kind of bodily ecriture feminine. Rather, the poem effectivelyperforms a double unmasking of ‘‘the body’’—one instigated by futurism, and oneexposing futurism. The former coincides with futurism’s rejection of metaphysics—thenotion dominant in the western philosophical tradition and embraced by both BenedettoCroce and Otto Weininger (and Giovanni Papini) that thought and beauty and genuinecreativity are of the spirit (and thus masculine), thus excluding from it both the bodyand 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 asentirely masculine, thus altogether eliding sexual difference. So, while Loy subscribes tofuturism’s anti-metaphysical recuperation of the body and sexuality, she also objectsto and rejects its monological virilization. Only a few years later, the women publishingin the wartime journal L’Italia futurista took a similar stand, and Benedetta, especially inher 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 motherhoodand female creativity. In 1936, the futurist painter and sculptor Marisa Mori paintedthe strikingly sensual Ebbrezza fisica della maternita (Physical Inebriation of Motherhood),a semi-abstract work that unknowingly echoed in visual terms many of the key themesof Loy’s ‘‘Parturition.’’39

Loy’s poem belongs to the history of literature not only because it is apparently thefirst poem ever written about the physical experience of childbirth from the point of viewof a woman in labor, but also because it is among the first texts in English to usemontage/collage as a texturing device.40 Its linking of sex and eroticism with imagesof childbirth and the maternal also make it a remarkable event in the literature ofmodern sexuality. ‘‘Parturition’’ is written with Loy’s characteristically futurist lack ofpunctuation, expressive spacing, and a montage-like juxtaposition of different sequencesand perceptions. In its ‘‘synthetic dynamism,’’ its rendering of physical sensations, theinterpenetration of mind and environment, the energies traversing the body, and theblurring 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 maternalbut also because it posits explicitly a unification of the ego: ‘‘And the ego succeeds inunifying the positive and negative/poles of sensation/Uniting the opposing and resistingforces/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 physicalpain of labor, and the strange rhythms of time and consciousness created by the successivewaves and the subsiding of contractions. Ontological questions of identity and sameness,of difference and repetition are juxtaposed with sheer physical sensations as if arisingdirectly from them: ‘‘Mother I am/Identical/With infinite Maternity/Indivisible/Acutely/I am absorbed/Into/The was—is—ever—shall—be/Of cosmic reproductivity.’’

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‘‘Against my thigh/Touch of infinitesimal motion/Scarcely perceptible/Undulation/Warmth moisture.’’ A third level of images is provided by associations emerging from theunconscious and the subconscious—dimensions to which Marinetti vehemently deniedboth 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 interestin it, and eventually developed a distinctive blend of surrealism and futurism in theirwork. Loy’s poem is also suffused with proto-surrealist images: ‘‘Rises from thesubconscious/Impressions of a cat/With blind kittens/Among her legs/Same undulatinglife-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 the tango e si parsifalizzano’’(‘‘some womenfriends who offer tango teas and Parsifalize themselves’’), entitled ‘‘Abbasso il tango eParsifal!’’(‘‘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 adisplay of futurist virility appear to be an act of (in)civil war between men, a polemicaddressed more towards Papini and other Weiningerian, heterophobic and homophilicmembers of Lacerba, than towards women indulging in tango-dancing. Loy, being at thecenter of it, was well aware of the theatrical dynamic of these exchanges, and enjoyedthe spectacle even as she acted in it. Skeptical of Marinetti’s violence, she wasnevertheless seduced by his energy: ‘‘I am in the throes of conversion to Futurism,’’ shewrote to her friend Mabel Dodge, ‘‘but I shall never convince myself. There is no hopein 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 fewmonths later, she felt her futurist risorgimento had begun, and wrote her ‘‘Aphorismson Futurism.’’ Ironically, despite or perhaps because of Papini’s sexual failures, Loy foundhim more sympathetic than Marinetti, and for a time developed a deep romanticattachment 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, whenthe affair was over, in two of her most famous poems, ‘‘Giovanni Franchi’’ and ‘‘TheEffectual 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 seemedto be refreshingly direct. As Loy’s biographer observes, Marinetti’s ‘‘exuberantpersonality’’ and boundless energy during their intermittent wartime affair (Marinettikept 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 theexpectations of her bourgeois upbringing and the late-Victorian education of herchildhood, extricate herself from her unhappy marriage to Stephen Haiwes, and gain aself-confidence that she never had before.

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LOY’S FUTURIST FEMINISM

One of the many ironies of Loy’s complex involvement with futurism is that it awokein 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 theUnited States. ‘‘What I feel now are feminine politics,’’ she wrote at about the same timeto her friend Carl Van Vechten. While in her poems she would soon stigmatizefuturist misogyny, and mock Marinetti’s machismo, making in fact a kind of poeticreputation for herself out of repeated (and well-deserved) Marinetti-bashings,43 in herletters she described her energy and optimism as products of futurism, and referred toMarinetti 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 theBritish suffragists. Her extraordinary ‘‘Feminist Manifesto,’’ written in November 1914,when she was still involved with Marinetti, is perhaps the most eloquent documentof Loy’s futurism. The manifesto was never published in Loy’s lifetime, and it appearedin correct form only in the 1996 Conover edition of Lunar Baedeker, based on themanuscript copy sent by Loy to Mabel Dodge in 1914.45

The manifesto is written in the typical style of futurist manifestos at the timeof Lacerba, using a free-word prose made visually striking and emphatic through the use ofexpressive 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 areaction 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 manifestoshave some striking thematic similarities. In her first manifesto, Valentine argued againstbiological essentialism, claiming that to divide humanity along gender lines on the basisof sexual difference is absurd, inasmuch as it is neither an absolute nor a valid basis fordifferentiating among human beings. Not only do men and women alike partake of themasculine and the feminine in varying degrees across a spectrum of sexual roles andattitudes but, according to Valentine, the feminine and the masculine themselves arerelative categories, culturally and historically variable and subject to change, rather thana fixed binary opposition. If women at present happen to be trapped by the traditionalpatriarchal roles and values denounced by Marinetti, it is not because these roles belongto them naturally or by instinct, for women can also be virile warriors. Woman shouldabandon those qualities of passivity and patience that have traditionally been assignedto her as the angel of the hearth. The role of wife should be abolished altogether, freeingwoman from her subjection to man. One of the most striking contentions of Valentine’stwo manifestos, couched in a rather melodramatic and hyperbolic language designed(in true futurist fashion) to shock the audience, was the notion that the libido orlife-instinct is a sexually unmarked instinctual force active in both men and women,whose potential violence is also common to both sexes. Like Marinetti, Valentineassociates virility with war, conflict and aggression, and femininity with peace, mediationand non-violence (as well as intuition and imagination). But she denies that women arenaturally, ‘‘by instinct’’ wise, peaceful and ‘‘good,’’ thus implicitly rejecting the notionthat women are inherently ‘‘feminine.’’ This is the core of her objections to Marinetti,

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who in his work had appeared to conflate women and the feminine. What distinguishesValentine’s position most sharply from that of Marinetti, and the reason of thecontroversy that led her to write the second manifesto, is her re-evaluation of female erosand sexual desire, which she calls luxure (lust). Luxure for Valentine is the most potentiallytransgressive force in human existence for both men and women, who must becomeconscious of its psychology and value while freeing themselves from all forms ofsentimental mystification and moralism. Female sexuality in particular does not have to bepassive, hidden, or repressed, she argues in ‘‘Manifeste futuriste de la luxure.’’ It can onthe contrary be a source of strength and creative inspiration for women. Of all ofValentine’s ideas, this was probably the most influential. It resonated deeply withinfuturism, and we find variations of it in the work of Mina Loy (as well as in the workof Enif Robert and Benedetta, among others).

Claiming to be a feminist text, Loy’s manifesto starts out aggressively, in an apparentparadox, by vehemently attacking the feminist movement: ‘‘The feminist movement as atpresent instituted is / Inadequate . . . Women . . . are you prepared for the Wrench—?’’The manifesto goes on to denounce as ‘‘pathetic clap-trap’’ the notion, proclaimed byboth Italian and British reformist feminism at the time, that woman should be granted theright 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 politicaland cultural system themselves are in need of ‘‘Absolute Demolition.’’ Both womenand men, according to Loy, are the victims of a cultural construction of gender basedon reciprocal exploitation; men exploit women sexually, and women exploit menfinancially. Thus women’s only real choices in the present system are parasitism orprostitution, which correspond to the roles of mistress or mother assigned by bourgeoissociety to women. Yet, Loy observes, the opposition between ‘‘sex’’ and ‘‘virtue’’(‘‘the fictitious value of woman’’) which legitimates the difference between these tworoles is entirely false, for ‘‘the woman who is a poor mistress will be an incompetentmother—an inferior mentality,’’ and ‘‘there is nothing impure in sex.’’

In order to be rid of the market value of purity, Loy provocatively advocatesthe surgical destruction of virginity. Maternity (as well as sexual pleasure) should be theright 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 ‘‘therace,’’ according to Loy. Every woman ‘‘of superior intelligence’’ should producechildren to counterbalance ‘‘the unfit and degenerate members of her sex.’’ Each of thesechildren 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.’’ Womanshould free herself of the mystifications of ‘‘love,’’ ‘‘sentimentality,’’ and ‘‘jealousy,’’ andsexual union between a man and a woman ‘‘should be the expression of an easy & ampleinterpenetration of the male and female temperaments.’’ The most objectionablecondition of woman for Loy—tantamount to enslavement—is the need to define herselfby ‘‘negation,’’ as the other of man. This form of ‘‘relative impersonality’’ (the idea that awoman is a ‘‘person’’ only in relation to man) is not femininity according to Loy. In Loy’svision, woman must have ‘‘indomitable will, irreducible courage’’ and ‘‘sound nerves.’’

Although she falls short of calling, like de Saint-Point, for the violent virilizationof woman, Loy clearly endorses de Saint-Point’s vision of a ‘‘strong’’ futurist womanwith the same qualities of superior intelligence, courage and daring as her male

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equivalent. She also shares with de Saint-Point, and with Marinetti, the evolutionist andNietzschean vision of a ‘‘superior’’ humanity, a stand which has made her ratherunpopular with contemporary feminists. Loy’s polemic against the electoral illusionsof reformist feminism echoes Marinetti’s statements, especially ‘‘Contro l’amore e ilparlamentarismo’’ (‘‘Against Love and Parliamentarism’’), which, like Loy’s manifesto,associates political and sexual revolution. Due perhaps to a misunderstanding ofMarinetti’s admittedly paradoxical and ironic position on feminism, Loy’s manifesto hasalso been misread. Virginia Kouidis, for example, claims that Loy’s rejection of sexualequality is a challenge to the futurist program, which endorsed suffragism.47 But in factLoy 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 bygaining the vote in the current parliamentary system that women would change theircondition, Marinetti maintained in ‘‘Against Love and Parliamentarism,’’ but by carryingout a more radical transformation and dismantling of the cultural practices and modesof thinking of which the current political system was the direct expression. However,since most women—brainwashed by the myths of feminine virtue and renderedculturally and intellectually inferior by centuries of subjection to the patriarchal order—seemed uninclined to such a revolution, and were bent rather on gaining the voteand entering the parliament, Marinetti sarcastically welcomed the vote for women, for itwould surely lead the European parliaments towards self-destruction while simulta-neously wreaking havoc on the patriarchal family, an institution which Marinetti foundequally contemptible.

Loy’s allusion to parasitism and to marriage as a kind of legalized and glorifiedprostitution is thus entirely in tune with the futurist vocabulary, as is her advocacy of afree and spontaneous sexuality. Where she marks new territory, however, is in her proudaffirmation 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 ‘‘compene-trazione.’’ 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 processof childbirth have to be animalistic and therefore transcended by masculine will power(the power that generates the mechanical son in Mafarka). The intellectual and thephysical 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 mechanizedman, but in the transformation of sexual codes to liberate both man and woman byending 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 thevery logic that Loy set out to dislodge. In launching an attack against the regressive andrestrictive 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 whenshe implied that futurist misogyny was a thing of the past—as reactionary and regressive asthe ideology that it set out to dismantle. Futurist misogyny was essentially based on themind/body split which had saturated western metaphysics since Plato, who had beenthe first to relegate woman, the body, and the maternal to the inferior, animal sphere, andto exalt the mind, the masculine and love among men as belonging to the superior realm

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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 remnantof the past. The global transformation of mentality and, in Loy’s words, ‘‘wider socialregeneration’’ that futurism looked forward to, required a radical rethinking of sexualityand of sexual difference.

NOTES

1. Carolyn Burke, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (Berkeley, CA: University of CaliforniaPress, 1996), 156.

2. ‘‘Nous voulons glorifier la guerre – seule higiene du monde – le militarisme, le patriotisme,le geste destructeur des anarchistes, les belles idees qui tuent, e le mepris de la femme.’’The complete ‘‘Fondation et manifeste du futurisme’’ was published in French in Le Figaro onFebruary 20, 1909. It can now be found in F. T. Marinetti, Le futurisme, preface by GiovanniLista (Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1980; first edition Paris: Sansot, 1911). The programmaticsection had already appeared in Italian, with some interesting differences: for example ‘‘le belleidee per cui si muore’’ (‘‘the beautiful ideas for which one can die’’) in French became themore startling ‘‘les belles idees qui tuent’’ (‘‘the beautiful ideas that kill’’). The Italian versioncan 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 theoriginal: ‘‘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 delladonna’’ (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 onit, but on the cover the date is 1910. The topos of ‘‘scorn for woman’’ remained powerful as arhetorical category and an instrument of provocation in futurist discourse well after theFirst World War, when women’s participation in the movement was not only accepted butactively 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 SindacatiArtistici, 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 theoristof avant-garde architecture, was among the protagonists of the still little-known communist-futurist 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, MarzioPallottini 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 liberationfor 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, InnocenzoCappa, F.T. Marinetti, Cesare Sarfatti, Renato Zavataro, seguite da una conclusione di Bruno Corra eEmilio Settimelli (Rocca San Casciano: Cappelli, 1918). For an account of the various phasesof 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 delpudore: La questione sessuale in Italia 1860–1940 (Venice: Marsilio, 1990), 53–54.

5. F. R. Marinetti, Mafarka le futuriste (Paris: Sansot, 1910), 214, 216.

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6. Readings in English of Mafarka as offensive, misogynistic and fascistic can be found in AliceYaeger Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), Cinzia Sartini Blum, The OtherModernism: F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist Fiction of Power (Berkeley, CA: University of CaliforniaPress, 1996), and Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasyin 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 lefuturiste,’’ in Perspectives on Pornography: Sexuality in Film and Literature, ed. Gary Day and CliveBloom (New York: Macmillan, 1988), 159–74.

7. In contrast to Anglo-American critics, European readers of futurism, for example GiovanniLista and Luciano De Maria, among others, have tended to gloss over its misogynistic, racistand 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 ideologicaland aesthetic grounds, finds its misogynistic violence unremarkable. Mario Verdone andClaudia Salaris are among the few who offer insightful and balanced comments on futuristmisogyny 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 futuristede 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 andFeminism 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 theessays in La futurista: Benedetta Cappa Marinetti, ed. Lisa Panzera (Philadelphia, PA: MooreCollege of Art and Design, 1988) and Franca Zoccoli, Benedetta Cappa Marinetti: L’incantesimodella luce (Milano: Selene Edizioni, 2000). Benedetta’s three novels have been reprinted in asingle volume, Le forze umane: Viaggio di Garara. Astra e il sottomarino, ed. Simona Cigliana(Rome: Edizioni dell’Altana, 1988). On Rosa Rosa, see Lucia Re, ‘‘Scrittura dellametamorfosi e metamorfosi della scrittura: Rosa Rosa e il futurismo,’’ in Les Femmes-Ecrivains en Italie (1870–1920): ordres et libertes, ed. Emanuelle Genevois, special issue ofChroniques Italiennes, Universite de la Sorbonne Nouvelle 39/40 (1994): 311–27. On EnifRobert, see Cecilia Bello Minciacchi, ‘‘Lo sperimentalismo terapeutico di Enif Robert,’’in Avanguardia 19 (2002): 75–94. In most critical literature on futurism, however, women areusually either ignored or presented, sometimes quite condescendingly, as brain-washed,masculinized, masochistic or otherwise misguided ‘‘groupies.’’ This is doubtlessly due in partto a piecemeal, incomplete knowledge, and the general unavailability of their work, as well asthe lack, until recently, of reliable modern editions. Only specialized studies and anthologiesdeal with women futurists in some detail, and there is still very little in-depth critical orcomparative work. Significant pioneering essays have been published by Claudia Salaris, whohas 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, WomenArtists of Italian Futurism (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1997). Recent contributionsinclude Silvia Contarini, La Femme futuriste: Mythe, modeles et representations de la femme dans latheorie e la litterature futuristes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris X, 2006), and the anthologySpirale di Dolcezza þ Serpe di fascino: Scrittrici futuriste. Antologia, ed. Cecilia Bello Minciacchi(Naples: Bibliopolis, 2007), which includes an excellent, thorough bibliography. (The lattertwo 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 togive 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 malefuturist poets of the early period such as Enrico Cavacchioli and Ardengo Soffici, probablybecause their work is routinely included in Italian anthologies and textbooks. Ironically,

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however, in his article ‘‘Futurism, Gender, and Theories of Postmodernity,’’ Textual Practice3.2 (1989): 202–21, Nicholls cites Valentine de Saint-Point’s ‘‘Futurist Manifesto of Lust’’ outof context as the basis for his claim that futurism’s vision of sexual desire was postmodernante-litteram. But Valentine’s manifesto was written to refute, not to represent the originalfuturist 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 balanceddiscussion of the futurist vision of women in English remains the chapter entitled ‘‘Futurismand Women,’’ in Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla, Futurism (London: Thames &Hudson, 1977), 153–64, though no women futurists are actually mentioned or discussedexcept for a brief allusion to Valentine de Saint-Point and the marchesa Casati. A section onwomen futurists is included, however, in the recent Futurism: An Anthology, ed. ChristinePoggi, 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 herand Marianne Moore, entitled ‘‘‘Others,’’’ The Little Review 4 (March 1918): 56–58. Poundanthologized Loy’s poem ‘‘The Effectual Marriage’’ several times, and in 1932 defined it asone 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 determininginfluence on e. e. cummings, among others. Loy published mostly in small magazines suchas The Little Review, Dial, Others, and Camera Work, but the intellectual influence of thesepublications—as was often the case for small magazines—far outweighed the number of copiespublished and sold. In a review published in Dial 80 ( June 1926): 496–99, Yvor Winterssuggested 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, comparedfor example to the acclaim elicited by the work of William Carlos Williams, are attributable tothe gender politics of modernism in the English-speaking world. Loy’s strong mix of technicalexperimentation and idiosyncratic feminism continued to be disturbing in the 1930s and1940s, even in supposedly avant-garde circles. On the reception and critical gender framingof Loy’s work, see Samuel French Morse, ‘‘The Rediscovery of Mina Loy and theAvant-Garde,’’ Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 2 (1961): 12–19, and CarolynBurke, ‘‘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 influencedby futurism, and that her relationship with the futurist movement was only one of satiricalcritique of their misogyny. See Elizabeth Arnold, ‘‘Mina Loy and the Futurists,’’ Sagetrieb8.1–2 (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 acknowledgingLoy’s futurist connection, have downplayed or misconstrued its importance. See NatalyaLusty, ‘‘Sexing the Manifesto: Mina Loy, Feminism and Futurism,’’ in Women: A CulturalReview 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; LauraScuriatti, ‘‘Bodies of Discomfort: Mina Loy, the Futurists and Feminism in Italy Between theWars,’’ in Women in Europe Between the Wars, ed. Angela Kershaw and Angela Kimyongur(London: Ashgate, 2007). Even Burke, who is the most careful interpreter of Loy’sinvolvement 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 spiritof Dada (Modernisms, 223), but Loy’s manifesto is clearly a futurist text, and pre-dates Dadaby 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 worksof 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).

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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’stextual history and emendations, see Conover, ibid., 215; henceforth page references to thiswork 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 bodiesin western art, the practice of painting from a nude model—from which women wereexcluded for centuries—was inherently discriminatory. Although allowed, painting of malenudes 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 thatfuturism’s repudiation of the feminine derives from the feminine’s supposed associationwith ‘‘interiority,’’ ‘‘introversion’’ and ‘‘the inner world’’ (p. 106) in fin-de-siecle culture isespecially unconvincing. On the contrary, in texts ranging from d’Annunzio to Croce toCecchi and many others, the feminine is associated with precisely the opposite—surfacesensation (and sensuality), sensory immediacy, materiality, carnal pleasure, surface and thebody, in other words, rather than depth and ‘‘the spirit’’ or ‘‘soul.’’ While in d’Annunziothe ‘‘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 newfuturist aesthetic. The early futurists tend to dismantle the fin-de-siecle masculine/feminineopposition by expropriating the feminine and ‘‘masculinizing it’’ through speed and thecreation of an effect of fast-moving surfaces, with no time for lingering in the explorationof interiority. The destruction of syntax (which is really its compression into a short-hand,telegraphic and ‘‘brutal’’ discourse), and words-in-freedom (analogies—sometimes quitefar-fetched—whose intermediate terms have been cut out for brevity) create an effect ofaccelerated rhythm which replaces both the slow fetishistic lingering on surface sensationsand 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 characteristicof futurist poetry. Loy, however, is not usually considered a futurist poet, partly because thiscosmopolitan, transnational (and yet paradoxically highly nationalistic) movement is stillprevalently studied within the boundaries of single national cultures. A notable exception isMarjorie 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 theDevelopment of Modern Poetry: A Comparative Study and Anthology (Ottawa: University ofOttawa Press, 1980). For an anthology with facing English translation of 61 Italian futuristpoets (including four women: Laura Serra, Maria Goretti, Dina Cucini, and Franca Maria

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Corneli), see Willard Bohn, ed., Italian Futurist Poetry (Toronto: Toronto University Press,2005).

25. Alfred Kreymborg, Troubadour: An Autobiography (1925), cited by Conover in Loy, Baedeker,188.

26. 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.

27. See Stein’s hilarious prose poem about Marinetti, entitled ‘‘Marry Nettie,’’ in Painted Lace(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955), 42–48.

28. See, for example, Aimee L. Pozorski, ‘‘Eugenicist Mistress & Ethnic Mother: Mina Loy andFuturism, 1913–1917,’’ in MELUS 30 (2005): 41–69, and Lara Vetter, ‘‘Theories of SpiritualEvolution, Christian Science, and the ‘‘Cosmopolitan Jew’’: Mina Loy and AmericanIdentity,’’ Journal of Modern Literature 32 (2007): 47–63. A more nuanced view may be foundin 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 byCesare 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, andthen, with the belated rise of colonialism and the conquest of Libya in 1911, it was usedincreasingly to create a comprehensive, all-encompassing and hybrid imaginary Italian or Italicor, 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 versionof eugenics based on the supposed benefits of mixed race breeding was favored in his work bythe hugely influential Lombroso. For Lombroso, who was Jewish, race mixing, in a mannersimilar to the benefits of cross-fertilization in plants, improved the ‘‘Italian stock.’’ On thequestion of race and racism in Italy, see Alberto Burgio, ed., Nel nome della razza: Il razzismonella storia d’Italia 1870–1944 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999).

29. See Burke’s insightful reading of these poems in Becoming Modern, 198–200.30. 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 somedesirable African ‘‘primitiveness,’’ and an enthusiastic promoter of Neapolitan culture andof the Italian South, the notion of ‘‘genialita’’ largely prevailed over any racialist prejudice,and ‘‘race’’ for him meant simply ‘‘a nation or people.’’ Thus he spoke of ‘‘l’irriducibileantipatia che divide tutte le razze dall’indigesta razza tedesca’’ (‘‘The irreducible antipathy thatseparates all races from the indigestible German race,’’ TIF 291), and blamed Nietzsche for nothating the German race enough. In ‘‘Nascita di un’estetica futurista’’ (‘‘Birth of a FuturistAesthetic,’’ 1915, TIF 314), he wrote: ‘‘Nei prossimi inevitabili conflitti dei popoli, vinceraquello che avra la piu profonda coscienza di questa differenza. Vincera il popolo piu geniale,piu elastico, piu agile, piu dimentico, piu futurista, e quindi piu ricco’’ (‘‘In the forthcominginevitable clashes among peoples, the one that will have the deepest conscience of thisdifference will prevail. The people with most genius will prevail: the most elastic, agile, andoblivious, the most futurist people, and thus, the richest’’). Although otherwise a fascistenthusiast after 1922, Marinetti did not approve of Mussolini’s anti-Semitic campaign in the1930s and his attempts to import the Nazi degenerate art campaign into Italy. See ClaudiaSalaris, Artecrazia: L’avanguardia futurista negli anni del fascismo (Florence: La nuova Italia, 1997).

31. Burke, Becoming Modern, 192. The dialogue was never published.32. Burke, Becoming Modern, 180.33. Letter to Carl Van Vechten, cited by Conover, in Loy, Baedeker, 179. See also Burke, Becoming

Modern, 187.34. Letter to Mabel Dodge Luhan, cited by Conover in Loy, Baedeker, 179.35. Burke, Becoming Modern, 189.36. 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/

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group/SHR/7-1/html/dunn.html. Unfortunately, Dunn does not discuss Loy’s connectionto the futurist vision of fashion.

37. 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 letteraturadella Nuova Italia (1914–1940), 6 vols. (first edition, in 4 vols., Bari: Laterza, 1914). In thisinfluential essay, Croce claims that excessive emotionalism, lack of rational and conceptualrigor, and lack of artistic labor (‘‘mancanza di elaborazione artistica’’) were most particularlya ‘‘difetto femminile’’ (‘‘feminine flaw’’). For Croce it was precisely woman’s instinctualnature, her stupendous and all-consuming ability to generate a child, that prevented her fromsuccessfully giving birth to a ‘‘fully realized aesthetic work.’’

38. Diotima, Mettere al mondo il mondo: Oggetto e oggettivita alla luce della differenza sessuale (Milan:La Tartaruga, 1990), in particular the essay by Adriana Cavarero, ‘‘Dire la nascita,’’ 93–121.

39. 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.

40. See Virginia M. Kouidis, Mina Loy: American Modernist Poet (Baton Rouge, LA: LouisianaState 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.

41. Quoted in Burke, Becoming Modern, 157.42. See Burke, Becoming Modern, 162–63.43. 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 ‘‘anxietyof influence’’ vis-a-vis Gabriele D’Annunzio. About this anxiety or rather ‘‘mimetic rivalry,’’see Pierpaolo Antonello, ‘‘On an Airfield in Montichiari, Near Brescia. Staging Rivalrythrough Technology: Marinetti and D’Annunzio,’’ Stanford Humanities Review 7 (1999),http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/7-1/html/antonello.html

44. Letter to Carl Van Vechten, cited by Conover in Loy, Baedeker, 180–81.45. 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 errorsand mistranscriptions which were pointed out by Loy scholar Rachel Blau DuPlessis andcorrected in the new edition. See Conover, in Loy, Baedeker, 216–17.

46. 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 ofVirginia, 1992), 264–91. The ‘‘Manifesto of Futurist Woman,’’ written in both an Italian anda 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, 1913in the collective volume Manifesti del futurismo by the publisher of the journal Lacerba in 1914,and widely circulated and translated into several languages.

47. Kouidis, Mina Loy, 29–30.48. Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900–1940 (Austin, TX: University of

Texas Press, 1986), 384.49. 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 parttwo, on Plato’s ‘‘Hystera,’’ and Ethique de la difference sexuelle (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1984).For a fascinating feminist discussion of Plato from this point of view, see also AdrianaCavarero, Nonostante Platone (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1990); In Spite of Plato: A FeministRewriting of Ancient Philosophy, trans. Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio and Aine O’Healy(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995).

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