미너 로이의 성과 사랑의 시

Abstract

This essay aims at unearthing the forgotten and lost female modernist, New Woman, Mina Loy. Her brilliant starlit remnants are literary works, paintings, drawings, and art works including “junk art” and lamp shades. Loy’s “Songs to Joannes” (1917) and “The Ineffectual Marriage” reflect her own experiences with fictional and former male lovers as well as Giovanni Papini. Certainly she is rigorously against Romantic conceptions of love, late Victorian values of gender binaries, and men’s commerce of the women so as to maintain the hom(m)o-sexual and self-same male economy. In that economy, woman has an exchange value, becomes a commodity in the market, and is consumed as a usable product between men. Rather than fixed genders or identities, I choose gender fluidity and shifting identities over times. In addition to her pornographic descriptions of love and sex, she is an adherent of contested notions of motherhood and sexuality. In “Songs to Joannes,” she interlopes the male-dominated society: otherwise “The Ineffectual Marriage” shows masculine interventions by Pound's editing and retitling. To specify institutions of marriage in Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” (1914), I draw topics on prostitutions in America, 1900-1918. Asserting forceful destruction of virginity, Loy is vehemently opposed to commercial exchange values of virginity in relation to marriages. She relocates old binaries, angel/monster, mother/whore, and nothing/excess of feminine sexuality, telling us to demolish “the division of women into two classes the mistress, & the mother”—for Duplessis, in Loy, “maternalist thinking meets free love.” De Beauvoir and Irigaray argue that woman is not needed to have a constant, static identity. Through its transcendental and liminal states, maternity in “Parturition” (1914) becomes an apparatus to achieve the feminine, fluid, and soft self with the acceptance of the otherness.