The Feminist-Futurist Fragmented Narrator in Mina Loy's 'Parturition'

Abstract

The British avant-garde poet, artist and feminist Mina Loy is an innovative female figure of the early twentieth century. Loy’s poetry is noted for unusual typography, multiple and shifting narrative voices and themes such as motherhood, gender, investigations of female mind and body and sexuality. Her artworks maintain an eclectic attitude synthesizing the ideas of the canonical art movements of the era—Futurism, Surrealism and Cubism. Loy’s “Parturition” (1914) gets the critical attention of the avant-garde community with its idiosyncratic subject, style and graphic description. The poem problematizes the complex relationships between Futurism and Feminism, and argues the act of parturition occurs in three embodiments of labour: physical childbirth, artistic creation and poetic production. So far, the literal interpretations of “Parturition” have generally focused on its physical aspect, treating labour as a parturient woman’s giving birth; however, this semiotic and intertextual investigation brings out the complexity of the text’s conceptions. This article, in terms of various concepts of “feminine writing” and evolution theories and with intertextual references to Loy’s “Aphorisms on Futurism,” aims to explore the poem’s “fragmented narrative” structure and to argue that its Feminist persona multiplies into three different identities—a feminist-futurist mother who resists the social domestication and classification of women, an avant-garde artist who subverts the retrospective aesthetic forms and re-forms the new ones, and a creative poet who overthrows conventional language forms and reconstructs a new form—Futurist language. These identities undergo various bodily and mental transformations eventually merging to construct new forms and achieve physical and psychological self-realization. Loy’s iconography, Ansikten [ca. 1910s], which, through the visual, semiotic and intertextual analogy I have created, seems to represent the mental and physical space of the maternal-artistic-textual narrator.