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Feminist Transmission

Ideas in Circulation: The Aesthetics of Transmission in Mina Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto”

Circulation des idées : l’esthétique de la transmission dans le « Manifeste féministe » de Mina Loy
Elise Ottavino

Résumés

L’article propose une lecture du « Manifeste féministe » de Mina Loy, écrit en 1914. Il s’intéresse particulièrement à la manière dont le manifeste traite la question de la transmission et de ses discontinuités, depuis la conception du texte jusqu’à sa publication. Tandis que le « Manifeste féministe » participe à la circulation d’esthétiques modernistes en explorant la place des femmes dans les mouvements artistiques du début du vingtième siècle, son instabilité générique trahit également les défis que posent les modes de transmission qui passent par le texte. Bien que Loy considère comme nécessaire ce qu’elle appelle la « Démolition Absolue », le manifeste emprunte malgré tout aux différentes communautés artistiques, scientifiques et politiques leurs outils rhétoriques. Les éléments du paratexte qui accompagnent le manifeste semblent suggérer des formes de transmissions « modernistes » qui seraient davantage du côté de l’intime : ce « fragment de diatribe féministe », explicitement adressé à Mabel Dodge Luhan dans une lettre qui dévoile les inspirations de la poétesse et sollicite les conseils de la destinataire, cultive une forme de dialogue intertextuel et interpersonnel. Cependant, dans la mesure où le manifeste ne fut publié que plusieurs années après la mort de l’auteure, il ne fut jamais diffusé auprès des contemporains de Loy. Si l’histoire éditoriale de Loy, qui fut jalonnée de fautes d’orthographe et d’imprécisions révèle souvent des lacunes dans la communication entre les différents acteurs de la production du texte, le « Manifeste féministe » résiste encore davantage à l’imprimé comme médium de transmission. Ainsi cet article s’interrogera également sur les obstacles éditoriaux qui continuent de s’opposer à la diffusion du manifeste aujourd’hui.

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  • 1 Mina Loy met arts patron and socialite Mabel Dodge Luhan (1879-1962) in 1910 while living in Floren (...)

1In an undated letter to her friend Mabel Dodge Luhan, the British artist Mina Loy (1882-1966) declares: “I am in the throes of conversion to Futurism – But I shall never convince myself” (Loy to Mabel Dodge Luhan, YCAL MSS 196a).1 Written in 1914, during the heyday of the futurist manifesto, Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” reads as a reaction to Marinetti’s scorn for women as it posits solutions for women’s sexual liberation in fairly transgressive terms. It asserts the fundamental opposition between men and women and recommends the “unconditional surgical destruction of virginity through-out the female population at puberty—” (Loy to Mabel Dodge Luhan, YCAL MSS 196b, underlined in the original), thus dissociating women’s value from virginity through this controversial surgical intervention. Its polemical diction and unconventional typography epitomise the conventions of the manifesto genre even though the text remained unpublished during the author’s lifetime; the manuscript was presumably only shared in a letter to Dodge Luhan. This tension between the public aim of the manifesto as a genre and the very intimate epistolary diffusion of Loy’s text interrogates the limits of textual transmission, defined here as the passage of a text from the author to other actors who are able to impact its meaning, whether it is by altering the contents of the page or simply by interpretating it in a way that may go beyond what the author intended. In this paper, I will seek to study the ways in which the “Feminist Manifesto” both participates in the circulation of Modernist aesthetics by exploring the place of women within early twentieth century movements, and points to the challenges of textual transmission through its generic instability.

  • 2 In “The Futurist Moment,” Marjorie Perloff talks about the rise of the manifesto form, defined by M (...)

2Textual transmission implies a movement from the author and to the reader. In the “Feminist Manifesto,” just like in any manifesto, reception is key since it is the very nature of the genre to spread ideas. Through carefully crafted rhetorical strategies, the manifesto aims at convincing its reader.2 As Loy’s text remains unfinished – meaning that the only holograph existing presents draft-like features and lacks final correction – studying it through the lens of textual studies proves particularly useful. Sir Walter Wilson Greg’s understanding of the field focuses on two main characteristics: textual criticism studies texts as both material and social objects, which signifies that it takes into account the physical appearance of a text, “how a sheet of paper has been folded” (Greg 1966, 78-79), and the various steps and actors involved in textual production (Greg 1966, 85). Similarly, D. F. McKenzie confirms that textual transmission is a social process (McKenzie 1999, 13). This attention to human activity is all the more meaningful here, since Loy’s manifesto bears the marks of the poet’s interest in various Modernist movements and her participation in the circulation of Modernist aesthetics.

3The “Feminist Manifesto” is a product of its time: not only does it belong to a genre that flourished in the first half of the twentieth century, but it is deeply influenced by the movements Loy gravitated towards in 1914. Thence, this personal take on feminist ideology becomes the stage of artistic dialogues in which the poet’s voice acts as mediator: while the manifesto intends to be in favour of women’s rights, the poet’s subversive ideas, combined with Marinetti’s influence, opposes feminist voices of the time. Beyond this positioning of the poet at the center of modernity, the manifesto deals with intimate matters. As a traditionally public document enclosed in a letter, Loy’s manifesto calls attention to the poet’s participation in a more personal form of transmission. The paratextual apparatus of the manifesto not only makes clear that the points tackled in its contents are responses to Loy’s readings and personal discussions, but it also invites us to recontextualise the manifesto’s formal features. Today, the “Feminist Manifesto” is available in print but keeps evading closure as Loy’s usage of the space of the page and typography challenges editorial transmission. Relying on Conover’s 1997 edition of the text, I suggest that, despite being written in prose, the manifesto loses meaningful features when translated from manuscript to print.

From a Rhetoric of Transmission to Artistic Synthesis

  • 3 For all the quotations from Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto,” I am following the spacing and line breaks (...)

4In her anthology entitled Manifesto: A Century of Isms, Mary Ann Caws defines the major features of the manifesto, which “was from the beginning and has remained, a deliberate manipulation of the public view” (Caws 2001, xix). First and foremost, the vocation of the manifesto genre is to circulate in the public sphere, to persuade its readers to rally behind a cause. Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” exemplifies this very idea from its first sentence: “[t]he feminist movement as at present instituted is Inadequate [sic]” (Loy to Mabel Dodge Luhan, YCAL MSS 196b, underlined in the original).3 The document opens on a strong statement of disagreement, emphasised by both the succinct syntactic construction of the sentence and the underlined final word that, in the holograph, is visibly bigger than the rest of the line. Loy’s rhetoric of transmission is embedded in her typographical choices as the use of larger lettering within the otherwise standardly sized text captures the reader’s gaze and impels a degree of engagement with the words on the page

& deny at the outset – that pathetic
clap – trap war cry
Woman is the equal of man
                       for
She is NOT. ! (Loy to Mabel Dodge Luhan, YCAL MSS 196b, underlined in the original)

5The long indentation before the conjunction “for” introduces a visual gap that makes the individually underlined words stand out all the more. Moreover, the recourse to blank spaces and line breaks clearly separates the belief in gender equality filling the entire width of the page, and the clipped dissenting statement that closes the paragraph. These arresting visual elements reveal the performative dimension of the text as Loy firmly asserts the inequality between genders at a time when Suffragettes campaigned for political equality. The physical division of the two points of view enables the construction of a dialogue in the very structure of the manifesto.

  • 4 Roger L. Conover is Mina Loy’s official editor and literary executor.
  • 5 Before writing the manifesto, Loy, then living in Florence, started getting closer to the figurehea (...)
  • 6 Also written in 1914, just like Loy’s manifesto, the “Futurist Synthesis of the War” somewhat esche (...)

6Though the manifesto reads as “an outrageous and provocative text” (Re 2009, 811) resembling Marinetti’s parole in libertà, which has been perfectly translated by different font sizes and a thorough study of layout in Roger L. Conover’s print edition of the text (Loy 1997, 153-6), it overtly opposes the Futurists’ antifeminist stance.4 Written “at the point in which her relationships with Papini and Marinetti had dwindled into emotional and intellectual disappointment” (Lusty 2008, 251), Loy’s manifesto still is influenced by the Futurist aesthetics.5 The “Feminist Manifesto” was indeed written the same year as her “Aphorisms on Futurism,” showing how significant Marinetti’s movement was in shaping her feminist position. The manifesto’s typography, albeit noticeable, is not as transgressive as that of iconic manifestos such as the 1914 “Futurist Synthesis of the War” (Marinetti 1972) but it is used in the service of destruction, the central theme of the 1909 “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” (Marinetti 1972).6 Diane Drouin notes how the question of genre, meaning both literary genre and gender in French, is embroiled in Loy’s use of Futurist aesthetics (Drouin 2023, 206). By borrowing from the Futurists, the poet builds her manifesto on rhetorical strategies that have already proven successful in gathering a mass audience. As Perloff reminds us, “the fact is that Marinetti became a public figure as a result of, not prior to, the publication of the first Futurist manifesto” (Perloff 1986, 83), thus proving the efficiency of his manifesto formula.

7Both “The Feminist Manifesto” and “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” rely on a series of binary oppositions. The main one is the tension between annihilation and renewal. Marinetti condemns the “futile worship of the past” (Marinetti 1972, 43) and celebrates a future that is brought forth by obliteration. Early in the manifesto, he narrates his meeting with two cyclists, which resulted in the capsizing of his beloved car and its salvage by fishermen: “[t]hey thought it was dead, my beautiful shark, but a caress from me was enough to revive it; and there it was, alive again, running on its powerful fins” (41). The machine is first destroyed in order to be reborn and animalised, more lively than before. Loy’s treatment of the female body is eerily similar to that of Marinetti’s car. Despite rejecting femininity, Marinetti’s “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” feminizes the car, which is the symbol of speed and progress: “We went up to the three snorting beasts, to lay amorous hands on their torrid breasts” (40). The lexical field of sexual intercourse pervades the passage, evoking a romantic bond between men and machines. Loy’s manifesto explicitly demands the “surgical destruction of virginity,” but the result of this mutilation literally triggers rebirth:

Every woman has a right
to maternity—
Every woman of superior intelligence
should realize her race-responsibility
in producing children in adequate pro-
portion to the unfit or degenerate mem-
bers of her sex— (Loy to Mabel Dodge Luhan, YCAL MSS 196b)

8The repeated call to birth children places mothers as builders of a new and supposedly better society. However, the manifesto fails to take a stand for all women and promotes hierarchy instead. Loy borders on eugenics as her initial apostrophe to “[e]very woman” is qualified; the modal “should” imposes maternal duty on a very specific group of women that the text posits as “superior” to others. The term “race-responsibility” suggests that women are in charge, not only as pillars of the family but also, through it, of society. The same term is reused later when Loy insists that “[w]omen must become more responsible for / the child than men” (Loy to Mabel Dodge Luhan, YCAL MSS 196b). Though it would be easy to see in that sentence a traditional conception of gender roles in which the mother takes care of the children in the private sphere, the polyptoton on “responsible” charges women with social duties. Loy reintroduces women in the political sphere by ascribing to them the education of future citizens. While reproducing Marinetti’s destructive posture, then, the “Feminist Manifesto” manages to push beyond his idea that the public sphere belongs to acts of “militarism” and “patriotism” (Marinetti 1972, 42) associated with masculinity.

9The subtle introduction of women into the public sphere through maternity mirrors the construction of Loy’s “feminist tirade” (Loy to Mabel Dodge Luhan, YCAL MSS 196a). Kate Schnur asserts that Loy’s rejection of “‘virtue’ and ‘virginity’” stems from “reading these concepts as the end results of the subjugation of women’s bodies, sexuality, and participation in the public and literary spheres” (Schnur 2020, 95). Yet deviating from Marinetti’s masculinist discourse paradoxically is, I would argue, a practical application of the Futurist aesthetics of transmission. In The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture, Perloff stresses the hybridity of the Futurist manifesto as a multi-layered document bringing together various artistic and textual traditions:

But the Futurist manifesto is also theatrical in a deeper sense, occupying as it does a “space that lies between the arts” and conflating verbal strategies that do not conventionally cohere: the ethical and pathetic arguments of classical rhetoric, the rhythm, metaphor, and hyperbole of Romantic lyric poetry, the journalistic narrative of everyday discourse, and the dialogic mode of drama which acts to draw the reader (or viewer) into its verbal orbit. (Perloff 1986, 111)

10Perloff’s exploration of the sometimes-clashing inspirations that nourish the Futurist manifesto provides an essential framework to analyse Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto.” The “theatrical” features characterising Futurist writing are repurposed here as the poet confronts different schools of thought, such as feminism and Futurism, in her manifesto. Furthermore, playing with words of various sizes is, after all, not specific to the Futurist movement but a common feature of the manifesto genre at the turn of the twentieth century. In this regard, the rhetoric of transmission at work in the “Feminist Manifesto” is part of the manifesto tradition shared by several intellectual groups sharing the public space at the time.

11In the Futurist manifesto, the opening narration enables the emergence of a “we” that, at first, simply refers to “[Marinetti’s] friends and [himself]” (Marinetti 1972, 39), but slowly evolves to include more people. The last lines are meaningful in that sense since the “we” of the social circle now encompasses an indeterminate “you” that seems to stand for all men: “[l]ift up your heads! Erect on the summit of the world, once again we hurl defiance to the stars” (Marinetti 1972, 44). In the Italian version of the manifesto, the list of demands opens on “[n]oi vogliamo” (Marinetti 1968, 10), which means “we want,” repeated about ten times throughout the document, instead of “we intend” (Marinetti 1972, 41) as proposed in R. W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli’s English translation, quoted here. Conversely, Loy detaches herself from the women addressed in her manifesto by asking them “[i]s that all you want?” (Loy to Mabel Dodge Luhan, YCAL MSS 196b). Where Marinetti’s wording fosters community and seeks to unite futurists, even as his misogynistic ideas cultivate division, Loy’s text hinges on impersonal sentence structures that exclude the speaker from other women and their struggles.

12Loy’s work avoids the inception of a “universal subject” (Lyon 1999, 3) to draw attention to her in-between position at the crossroads of discourses. Loy’s neutral stance is perhaps what best expresses the dialogism at the heart her “Feminist Manifesto.” She is evidently critical of patriarchy as it is deemed “no longer mascu- / line” (Loy to Mabel Dodge Luhan, YCAL MSS 196b), yet she also distances herself from women. The use of the term “feminist” in the very title links Loy’s ideas to the organised movement campaigning for woman’s suffrage, but when feminist figureheads are mentioned, it is always to point out the limits of their reasonings. In her private letters, the poet seems doubtful of “Mrs Sanger’s idiotic book of—‘preventive’ propaganda—” (Loy to Mabel Dodge Luhan, YCAL MSS 196a) and the manifesto cements this skepticism since “[a]t a time when Margaret Sanger advocated for a married woman’s right not to have children, Loy argued for a single woman’s right to have them” (Prescott 2010, 195).

13Similarly, when the poet claims that women “have the choice between Para- / sitism, & Prostitution—or Negation” (Loy to Mabel Dodge Luhan, YCAL MSS 196b, underlined in the original), the three categories can be traced back to “earlier feminists Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Olive Schreiner” (DuPlessis 2001, 56) as Gilman, specifically, presents women as “parasite mate[s]” who are fed and taken care of in exchange for “sex-relation” (Gilman 1998, 141, 5). These categories are later invalidated when the poet declares that “there are no restrictions” (Loy to Mabel Dodge Luhan, YCAL MSS 196b, underlined in the original). On the one hand, feminist contributions appear in the text – even if they are not explicitly mentioned – while on the other hand they are constantly undermined:

NO scratching on the surface
of the rubbish heaps of tradition,
will bring about Reform. (Loy to Mabel Dodge Luhan, YCAL MSS 196b, underlined in the original)

14Those lines use the same tone of condescension as Wyndham Lewis, when he chides Suffragettes for using art vandalism as a form of protest in the first volume of his Vorticist magazine Blast: “mais soyez bonnes filles! Nous vous aimons! We admire your energy. You and artists are the only things (you don’t mind being called things?) left in England with a little life in them” (Lewis 1914, 151). Loy is both writing for women and addressing them with contempt. The tension between conflicting voices fragments Loy’s work and makes her position toward feminism less graspable. Loy situates both her feminist insights, and women more generally, in the “space that lies between” (Perloff 1986, 111) the artistic and political circles of her time.

Intimate Transmissions, Feminine Filiations

  • 7 The importance of communities has already been thoroughly studied, especially in terms of Loy’s int (...)

15Beyond her engagement with the loud movements constituting the modern artistic and political scenes, Loy is also interested in smaller communities. In her 1918 pamphlet “Psycho-Democracy,” she is wary of the spreading beliefs of the “dominating class” (Loy 1921, 17) and invites her readers to turn to “‘collectivit[ies]’ moved by the same intellectual logic” (Loy 1921, 15).7 Despite being written after the “Feminist Manifesto,” the essay “Psycho-Democracy” perhaps explains Loy’s reluctance to reach for universality in her address to women: she is mostly interested in the thoughts of like-minded artists. In the paratextual apparatus to the manifesto, Loy’s involvement with other artists is presented in a much more personal light. Instead of flitting from one movement to another to map the space of modernity, the letters to Mabel Dodge Luhan posit the linearity of transmission, especially between women.

16Central to the “Feminist Manifesto” is the surgical removal of the hymen, a violent image that has become a symbol of Loy’s transgressive writing and, as Sara Crangle argues, “a means of feminist embodiedness” (Crangle 2024, xix). Invaded, the female body becomes the site of political rather than personal decisions. This clinical outlook on physicality is not surprising, however. Sanja Bahun’s ethnographic study of Loy’s works underscores the poet’s engagement across different fields of study: “Mina Loy was creating in a context marked by the open and dynamic traffic between literary and scientific discourses, especially literature and sciences like sexology, psychology and anthropology” (Bahun 2021, 130). Bahun locates this scientific taste in the poems, noting how the lexicon of biology is often used in the service of intimacy in “Songs to Joannes” (Bahun 2021, 134).

  • 8 Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) was one of the founders of British sexology. Paul Peppis describes Ellis (...)

17In the manifesto, science is the medium of literary filiation: Loy indeed expresses this idea in one of her letters to Luhan: “I find the destruction of virginity—so daring don’t you think—had been suggested by some other woman years ago—see Havelock Ellis” (Loy to Mabel Dodge Luhan, YCAL MSS 196a, underlined in the orginal).8 If she glosses over the source of her findings, the poet still positions herself as a reader in her own creative process, a fact that becomes even more evident when reading the manifesto in conversation with the passage mentioned in Ellis’s Psychology of Sex:

  • 9 As per my research, I was not able to find the name of the author of Jungfräulichkeit?: Una Poenite (...)

Thus the German authoress of [Jungfräulichkeit?:] Una Poenitentium (1907), considering that the protection of a woman is by no means so well secured by a little piece of membrane as by the presence of a true and watchful soul inside, advocates the operation of removal of the hymen in childhood. It is undoubtedly true that the undue importance attached to the hymen has led to a false conception of feminine “honor,” and to an unwholesome conception of feminine purity. (Ellis 2004)9

18The name of the “German authoress” is never once mentioned in this passage. However, such indeterminacy does not affect the intertextual interplay, which stems from a chain reaction since Ellis’s readings are passed down to his readers, among whom is Mina Loy, who, in turn, passes down what she learnt from Ellis to her own readers. Loy is indebted to both the unnamed authoress and the sexologist since she includes his comment on “feminine purity” in the manifesto: “[t]he fictitious value of woman as identified / with her physical purity—is too easy.” The focus on the hymen emphasises Loy’s expertise on scientific discourses of the time and the essential place attributed to the female body within those discourses. The manifesto “positions the female body beyond the circulation of patrimony by fragmenting the body, destroying the hymen as the singular gauge of women’s cultural value” (Crangle 2021, 248). This bodily tearing off, in turn, allows for a more feminine type of heritage linked with the passage of ideas from one woman to another.

  • 10 The echo between “Woman-Cause” and “Woman’s Cause” was noted by Drouin (Drouin 2023, 213).

19Loy’s ambivalent vocabulary when discussing women’s rights in fact supports a more personal understanding of feminism. Alice Jardine reminds us that “[a]s a generic term, ‘feminism’ is semantically tortuous and conceptually hazardous. Generally understood as a ‘movement from the point of view of, by, and for women,’ it covers substantial ground and becomes particularly dangerous across borders” (Jardine 1986, 15). Loy at times counterbalances the labyrinthine semantics of the word by avoiding it: to Mabel Dodge Luhan she writes, “I feel rather hopeless of devotion to the Woman-Cause” (Loy to Mabel Dodge Luhan, YCAL MSS 196a). Yet in her satirical poem “Lions’ Jaws” (also written in reaction to Futurism and published in 1920), she names herself “Imna Oly / (secret service buffoon to the Woman’s Cause)” (Loy 1997, 49).10 Today, “far from designating a unique, unequivocal perspective and/or a single issue, the women’s cause refers to a wide array of particular causes associated to the advancement of women […] beyond the self-identified ‘feminist’ movement” (Bereni 2019, 209). This anachronistic definition of the term is still useful in Loy’s case. The term was not uncommon in the early twentieth century, but Loy uses it in the singular form in her letters – “woman’s cause” instead of “women’s cause.” This slight difference accentuates the irruption of individual matters within the realm of feminism.

20The fragmented addressee of the “Feminist Manifesto” evades collective action. In the body of the text, the general statement addressing all “women” is soon replaced by the poet’s regard for women “of superior intelligence” only (Loy to Mabel Dodge Luhan, YCAL MSS 196b). Outside of the text, Loy’s feminist concerns remain enclosed in an epistolary message for her close friend’s eyes only. In that sense, the manifesto deals with “a multiplication of mutable audiences and addressees” (Scuriatti 2024, 44) and cannot cater to all of them. According to the paratextual details, the figure of the addressee is even more layered. At several points in her letters to Dodge Luhan, Loy inquires about her friend’s opinion on feminism. Her remarks range from simple interrogations about gender to more pointed queries about her “Feminist Manifesto.” On the first page of the manuscript, the poet already makes use of the empty spaces around her title and between the lines to scribble a note to Luhan: “[t]his is a rough draught beginning of an absolute resubstantiation of the feminist question. Give me your opinion. Of course it easily will be proved fallacious—there is no truth—anywhere.” The imprecise referent “it” makes it unclear whether it is Luhan’s “opinion” or Loy’s “resubstantiation” that is to be treated cautiously. Christina Walter understands that the poet is referring to the latter and “distanc[ing] herself” from her own work (Walter 2009, 669), which is supported by Loy’s renewed interest in Luhan’s approval: “[d]o tell me what you are making of Feminism? I heard you were interested—have you any idea in what direct[ion] the sex must be shoved—psychologically I mean—” and “[b]y the way that fragment of Feminist tirade I sent you—flat?” (Loy to Mabel Dodge Luhan, YCAL MSS 196a). Though Mabel Dodge Luhan provides no comment on the repeated inquiries, this insistence suggests that Loy’s feminist practice is situated, in the sense that it is attuned to her close relations’ beliefs, and would ideally be constructed with the help of the poet’s artistic community. In Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy, Carolyn Burke relates that Dodge and Frances Simpson Stevens told Loy about Sanger’s scandals in America while Loy was still in Italy feeling remarkably lonely (Burke 2021, 179-180). The latter’s knowledge of feminist effort was then coming, at least in part, from her friends’ letters.

Editorial Transmission: The Challenges of Publication

  • 11 The “SCUM Manifesto,” written in 1967, is a pamphlet that accuses men of creating the main problems (...)

21Breanne Fahs’s anthology of feminist manifestos Burn It Down! Feminist Manifestos for Revolution (2020) references a range of texts about feminism from the 1850s onward: Loy’s manifesto is reproduced in a section entitled “Angry/Violent” (Fahs 2020, 203-268), nestled between two documents from the 1960s – the “Redstockings Manifesto” and Valeria Solanas’s “SCUM Manifesto.”11 Both manifestos are much more accusatory and aggressive toward men than Loy’s. The “Feminist Manifesto” is violent toward the female body rather than the male one, and the language used presents women as enablers of their own demise:

Women must become more responsible for
the child than man—
Women must destroy in themselves, the
desire to be loved— (Loy to Mabel Dodge Luhan, YCAL MSS 196b)

  • 12 The theory of “final intentions” involves finding the best copy-text to use for an edition. Here, t (...)

22The anaphoric repetition “[w]omen must” paradoxically imposes more roles on women in a text that revolves around the idea that they are “exploited.” Women are still given orders but the way it is done, with modals, threats of destruction, and cutting syntactic structures, channels a form of aggressivity. More importantly, the anthology’s editor did not publish the very famous edited version of Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto,” but facsimiles of the manuscript. This choice points to the unfinished nature of the text and the various challenges incumbent upon the editor, since, as Walter Ong suggests, “[p]rint encourages a sense of closure, a sense that what is found in a text has been finalized, has reached a state of completion [...]. The printed text is supposed to represent the words of an author in definitive or ‘final’ form” (Ong 2001, 132). Loy’s manifesto rejects “final intentions” (Bowers 1964, 227) and as such, transmission of the text today has been stymied.12

23The Lost Lunar Baedeker, Conover’s edition of Loy’s collected works, provides essential background on the editorial process. In its “Editorial Guidelines and Considerations,” Conover confirms the idea that when it comes to Loy, “a definitive text is wishful at best” (Loy 1997, 169). He focuses briefly on the layout of the page and typefaces to signal how the movement from manuscript to typed up codex is just as clumsy as the passage from one idiom to another:

Some holograph sources bear indeterminate cursive flicks which do not always have typographic equivalents. The transition from holograph to type or from one house style to another tends to destroy evidence of this sort, and forces the appearance of blank space, the character of letters, and the thickness of dashes to conform to the availability of fonts and the exigencies of a publisher’s or printer’s typographic methods or in-house conventions. (Loy 1997, 174)

24Rightly discussed as a point of contention, Loy’s use of punctuation cannot easily be translated into regulated typographical symbols. In the manifesto specifically, some very low dashes almost read as elongated periods rather than em-dashes whereas other similar signs are seemingly clearer. The “spacious, breathless dashes” (Crangle 2021, 252) act as extensions of the poet’s body on the page. She is absent in the personal pronouns “you” and “she” that pervade the text, but stays visible in the breath afforded by dashes:

The only point at which the interests
of the sexes merge—is the sexual
embrace. (Loy to Mabel Dodge Luhan, YCAL MSS 196b)

  • 13 “The long dash placed at the end of line 30 acts as a curtain raiser which dramatises the scene. Th (...)

25The placement of the dash in the sentence is surprising here as there is nothing in the syntactic structure that calls for a sign of punctuation between subject and verb. Laure de Nervaux-Gavoty’s work on Loy’s “On Third Avenue” interprets the long dash on line thirty of the poem as a theatrical element lifting a veil on the street spectacle (de Nervaux-Gavoty 2009, 157).13 In the passage from the “Feminist Manifesto,” a similar dramatising effect is created through the dash. It produces a form of suspense which interrupts both the unfolding of the line and the “merg[ing]” described, like the reminder of an absence. The dash contradicts what is written, which is reminiscent of the little comment left at the very top of the manuscript as an afterthought: “it easily will be proved fallacious” (Loy to Mabel Dodge Luhan, YCAL MSS 196b).

26The generic overlap that takes place in the holograph complicates the editorial process. Intermingled on the holograph’s first page, the opening lines of the manifesto and Loy’s heading enact the “interpenetration” described in the body of the text:

For the harmony of the race, each indi-
vidual should be the expression of an easy
& ample interpenetration of the male & female
temperaments—free of stress (Loy to Mabel Dodge Luhan, YCAL MSS 196b)

  • 14 In “Mina Loy and the Quest for a Futurist Feminist Woman,” Lucia Re adds that “[t]he phenomenon of (...)

27The sexually-coded term establishes the porous nature of genders as they meet for intercourse, but this lack of boundaries goes beyond men and women in the manifesto; the domestic and public spheres, “[t]he intellectual and the physical” (Re 2009, 813), the inside and the outside, the textual and the paratextual all interlace as well.14 The loud and performative typography of the “Feminist Manifesto” might well be a symbol of intimacy as it looks less impressive, more intimate when compared to the rest of the letters. The manuscript is not as rushed as Loy’s other letters, but the formal and typographical elements are all very much a feature of her conversational epistles. To her literary agent Carl Van Vechten, she writes: “I am glad you have got your picture back that I gave you” (Loy to Carl Van Vechten, underlined in the original), with the underlined words slightly bigger or more legible than the rest of the sentence. In her letters to Mabel Dodge Luhan, this style of writing is associated with intimate matters: “I am rather Blue—I’ve seen P[apini] again—& I’m frightfully in love—& he hates me—” (Loy to Mabel Dodge Luhan, YCAL MSS 196a, underlined in the original). “Hates” is not only more sizable than other words: it is also underlined twice, which conveys a sense of agitation on the page. Loy’s attention to word sizes cannot be reduced to a handwritten practice, however. In the print draft of “Aphorisms on Futurism,” available in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the first word of each line is entirely capitalised, as well as other important words: “BUT the Future is only dark from outside. / Leap into it—and it EXPLODES with Light” (Loy “Aphorisms on Futurism”). Bozhkova’s study of the aphorisms comments on the fact that “capitalization of words rarely coincides with the logical emphasis” (Bozhkova 2015, 14), which contrasts with the letters: the size of “Hates” seems to be proportional to its importance in the sentence. The “Feminist Manifesto” then both echoes Loy’s idiomatic personal writing and Futurist experiments with the manifesto form.

28The manifesto’s style is close to that of the letters which “are not written for publication” (Loy to Carl Van Vechten); however, details on the page prove Loy’s attention to form – for instance, the words “Absolute Demolition” (Loy to Mabel Dodge Luhan, YCAL MSS 196b, underlined in the original) were not capitalised at first and the earlier version is still visible behind the capitals. The tension between formal constraints and the relative freedom of epistolary conversation is nowhere more visible than in the layout. Conover rightly points out that the manifesto is written in prose (Loy 1997, 216). Indeed, the poet has crossed out many words throughout the holograph and those scribbles do not seem to affect the structure of the text or Loy’s intentions. Nevertheless, line breaks seem, at times, manufactured and purposeful:

The man who lives a life in which his
activities conform to a social code
which is a protectorate of the feminine
element——is no longer mascu-
line
The women who adapt themselves to a
Theoretical valuation of their sex as a
relative impersonality, is not yet
Feminine (Loy to Mabel Dodge Luhan, YCAL MSS 196b)

29The peculiarly long dash – longer than any other dash in the manifesto – on the fourth line forces “masculine” to be separated into two parts as the poet reaches the end of the line, while “feminine” appears twice in the excerpt and always in its complete form. The broken “masculine” illustrates the idea that patriarchal values are “no longer” acceptable. Men are shortened and torn from the very act of writing in the same way that “line” is separated from the rest of the paragraph.

30Conversely, women become the structuring force behind the layout. Once more, the typographical space highlights Loy’s target addressee: “Women.” The word stands out even more on the digital page than in the holograph, where it is still slightly isolated from the rest of the sentence:

Women if you want to realise yourselves
            —you are on the eve of a
devastating psychological upheaval
all your pet illusions must be un-
masked—the lies of centuries
have got to go—are you prepared
for the Wrench—? (Loy to Mabel Dodge Luhan, YCAL MSS 196b)

31In “Purging the Birdcage,” Jacinta Kelly writes that “[t]he manifesto is productive precisely because it announces that the body cannot be contained” (Kelly 2012, 7). She develops this idea by reading Loy in dialogue with Henri Bergson’s writings. This is exactly what is at stake in the passage. The dashes perform “the Wrench” at the level of syntax as four sentences are interwoven in the space of seven lines. The main one – “Women if you want to realise yourselves […] all your pet illusions must be un-/masked” – is both interrupted by and merged with the digression on “psychological upheaval.” As such, dashes are not to be interpreted as dependable signs of punctuation making the reading of the lines easier. Instead, they create disjointed fragments of speech that invite the reader to spend more time with the page in order to make sense of the muddled diction. The initial apostrophe brings all the embedded sentences together and seems to exceed syntactical units. This mingling of the body and the space of the page is even more visible in the holograph as the first two lines are so close to one another and the line under “Women” is so low that the word seems to take up two lines instead of one. Those handwritten effects, of course, cannot be easily reproduced in print and would thwart the legibility of the text.

  • 15 Here, I understand accessibility in terms of legibility, but I also keep in mind that the manuscrip (...)

32In his introduction to Representing Modernist Texts, George Bornstein notes that Modernist writers used formal innovations to reclaim authorship over the editorial process and control the transmission of their texts (Bornstein 1991, 2). In the case of Loy’s manifesto, leaving the text as a manuscript slows its transmission as it becomes less accessible, but editing it necessarily means making choices that do not comply with the handwritten text.15 If digital tools seem to promise more flexibility in textual editing, the same problems remain. Andrew Pilsch’s online version of the manifesto offers a digital text that pays attention to all the typographical details while

follow[ing] the print volume’s decision to the letter, even leaving in line breaks that probably resulted from page size. […] Formatting “Feminist Manifesto” for online reading, otherwise, would, I feel, force me to make too many personal decisions about the text and I’m not comfortable with that. (Pilsch 2016, n. pag.)

33Pilsch, then, moves the print edition to a new medium and, with this remark, stresses the instability of the source text. The “Feminist Manifesto” constantly redefines the parameters of the page; the poet’s playful arrangement of the space of the page is particularly visible on the first two pages of the manuscript, before subsiding in the rest of the manifesto. The commanding text cohabits with scratched out words, traces of what it almost was. By remaining in flux, Loy’s manifesto captures the otherness at the heart of transmission in its very structure and points out the editorial challenges that are at the core of Modernist texts.

34The “Feminist Manifesto” links Loy’s idiomatic feminism to Modernist aesthetics: the text reflects the taste for the manifesto genre as well as the experiments with formal features that characterise the avant-garde, and synthesises the place of feminine experience in artistic, political, and scientific discourses of the time. The document also underlines that, in artistic communities specifically, friendship serves as a catalyst for creation. The multiple inspirations for the manifesto mirror the different layers of addresses inscribed in the ambiguous genre of Loy’s feminist exploration. The manifesto exists outside of generic boundaries, which complicates the editor’s work today. When investigating the “Feminist Manifesto,” one is not only confronted with the particular status of manuscripts, but also with the challenges linked with the avant-garde subversion of the space of the page. Ultimately, the porous and open nature of Loy’s manifesto questions the limits of textual transmission.

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Notes

1 Mina Loy met arts patron and socialite Mabel Dodge Luhan (1879-1962) in 1910 while living in Florence, Italy (Burke 1996, 119), and partook in her salons (Scuriatti 2019, 8).

2 In “The Futurist Moment,” Marjorie Perloff talks about the rise of the manifesto form, defined by Marinetti in a letter to painter Henry Maassen (Perloff 1986, 81). The manifesto, which is discussed as a form of opposition, a “grafting of the poetic onto the political discourse” (82), aims at “meet[ing] the needs of a mass audience” (81).

3 For all the quotations from Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto,” I am following the spacing and line breaks of the manuscript, available at the Beinecke Digital Library, https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/2041800. By typing out the handwritten text, I hope to evidence Loy’s flexible use of punctuation marks as they are less visible in the draft-like letter to Mabel Dodge Luhan than on a typed page.

4 Roger L. Conover is Mina Loy’s official editor and literary executor.

5 Before writing the manifesto, Loy, then living in Florence, started getting closer to the figureheads of the Futurist movement. She notably was inspired by F. T. Marinetti and Giovanni Papini (Burke 1996, 151-154).

6 Also written in 1914, just like Loy’s manifesto, the “Futurist Synthesis of the War” somewhat eschews linearity. The title is split onto two pages and slant lines collide to the text.

7 The importance of communities has already been thoroughly studied, especially in terms of Loy’s interest in literary salons and in various linguistic circles. See for example Scuriatti (2024, 135-158), Bozhkova (2019, n. pag.) or Voyce (2008, 627-643).

8 Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) was one of the founders of British sexology. Paul Peppis describes Ellis as part of the “canonical figures” (Peppis 2014, 6) of sexology as he was widely read among Modernist writers.

9 As per my research, I was not able to find the name of the author of Jungfräulichkeit?: Una Poenitentium, which can be roughly translated by “Virginity? A Penitence,” nor to confirm that it was written by a woman. The book is cited in German sexologist Max Marcuse’s dictionary of sexology, published in 1923, which shows that it was fairly well-known at the time.

10 The echo between “Woman-Cause” and “Woman’s Cause” was noted by Drouin (Drouin 2023, 213).

11 The “SCUM Manifesto,” written in 1967, is a pamphlet that accuses men of creating the main problems and failures plaguing society, which women then have to fix. The lexical field is denunciatory and demeaning, going as far as calling men “a walking abortion” (Fahs 2020, 217). The “Redstockings Manifesto” dates from 1969. Here again, men are clearly defined as oppressors, but the manifesto reads as a call for unity: men have to reject a society based on male privileges and women have to stand together to face their oppressor (Fahs 2020, 207-209).

12 The theory of “final intentions” involves finding the best copy-text to use for an edition. Here, there is only one manuscript of Loy’s manifesto and yet it still evades stability. To learn more about “final intentions,” see Tanselle (1976, 167-211).

13 “The long dash placed at the end of line 30 acts as a curtain raiser which dramatises the scene. The street is defined as the place where a visual spectacle is perpetually renewed, as the space where a magical extravaganza that borrows from surrealism is unveiled” (de Nervaux-Gavoty 2009, 157, my translation).

14 In “Mina Loy and the Quest for a Futurist Feminist Woman,” Lucia Re adds that “[t]he 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” when she discusses “interpenetration” (Re 2009, 813).

15 Here, I understand accessibility in terms of legibility, but I also keep in mind that the manuscript, though easily available online, remains mostly a study tool dedicated to researchers who know where to find it.

16 All online references last accessed 6 June 2025.

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Elise Ottavino, « Ideas in Circulation: The Aesthetics of Transmission in Mina Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” »Sillages critiques [En ligne], 38 | 2025, mis en ligne le 01 octobre 2025, consulté le 16 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/17279 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/150ru

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Auteur

Elise Ottavino

University of Western Ontario

Elise Ottavino was awarded a PhD in Anglophone literature from the University of Western Ontario in 2023 after defending her dissertation on “Capacious Feminism: Intimacy and Otherness in Mina Loy’s Poetry.” Her research focuses on the relation between textual studies and feminism and she is particularly interested in how genetic criticism can shed light on Modernist manuscripts, notably with the help of digital tools. She has recently produced a conference report for “Mina Loy and Her Networks” (Transatlantica 2, 2023). She has recently produced a conference report for “Mina Loy and Her Networks” (Transatlantica 2, 2023).

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