Just Out: Stories and Essays of Mina Loy

More Mina! Dalkey Archive has just published Stories and Essays of Mina Loy, edited by Sara Crangle. Bookslut reminds us that it's the third installment "over a twenty-year effort to recover the omitted Modernist doyenne's work," Loy being uninterested in self-promotion and almost lost to us until 1982, when "Roger L. Conover published The Last Lunar Baedeker, followed twelve years later by the more known The Lost Lunar Baedeker, published concurrently with Carolyn Burke's stellar biography Becoming Modern." While most of those books focus on Loy's work as a poet, the previously unpublished prose collected here should solidify her reputation as the inventive creator of an oeuvre. The stories and essays, Bookslut says, "show a preoccupation with answering the Freudian one-liner 'What do women want?', a rhetorical question that Loy saw only answered by men, and that she allegorized within the Sphinx":

Best known as the Greek half-woman, half-lion sentinel of Thebes, the Sphinx asked those wanting entry a riddle, and devoured them if their answer was incorrect. However, as Sara Crangle writes in her introduction to this collection: "Robert Sheffield appears to be the only critic thus far to comment upon Loy's frequent mention of the sphinx in her papers; he quite reasonably claims that 'Loy's point of departure is Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray in which the decadent Lord Henry Wotton dismisses women as "Sphinxes without secrets."’"

After looking at some of the stories—"The Agony of the Partition," "Lady Asterisks," "The Stomach" (which "relates the artifice of catering to the male gaze"), and "Pazarella"—S.J. Chambers of Bookslut winds up discussing Loy's forthright feminism, most evident in essays like "Catholik Confidante" and "Conversion":

Loy saw false securities in the notion of intellectual equality as well as body politics. In "Conversion" she declares a blatant mistrust for psychoanalysis, and sees within its semantics the same oppression as she saw in "Catholik Confidante": "The obsession prescribed by the Holy Church of Rome, are reedited by the Psychoanalysis... [Who] has raised sex to the venerable status of a duty and WHO -- wants to do his duty?" According to the "The Library of the Sphinx," the collection's pièce de résistance, it is mostly Modernist male authors who want to do their duty. This women's literature manifesto calls out Joyce, Ellis, Lawrence, and D'Annuzio for projecting their desires upon the liberated woman, and simplifying her worries as a congested "sexual passage" needing clearing by the "syringe in his pocket." The modern woman was only questioned about her sexuality, and the only answer her male inquisitor allowed her were orgasmic affirmations to his prowess: "The primary phenomenon of our new 'liberate' literature -- is the superiority complex of the male as regards his intimate relationship with the female."

What was perhaps most disappointing to Loy was not that women were being liberated by the same thing that had oppressed them for so long, but that women were not writing about it. The Library that should be filled with liberated Sphinxes -- women who regained their awareness and could answer -- was empty of their presence. In fact, according to Loy, most intellectual women seemed content to have male authors write on their behalf: "Your literature --" Loy scoffs at The Sphinx, "let us examine it your literature -- It was written by the men --"

At this point in the collection, The Sphinx has transcended allegory and metaphor for Loy, and is a person embodying those Bluestockings that have been sleeping on the job. Loy hits The Sphinx on the head with Ulysses and tells her to wake up from her impassivity: "Let us make the absolute descent from Parnassus and examine the opus par excellence wherein the secret of the sphinx claims to be positively shredded of its veils..." Within the vast male literature explored, Loy sees nothing but female dissatisfaction: "Practically the whole of our psychological literature written by men might be lumped together as the unwitting analysts of the unsatisfied woman."

You can read the entire review here.