Contents
List of Figures
ix
Acknowledgements
x
Abbreviations
xii
Introduction: Modernist Studies and Cultural Studies
Modernist studies?
Cultural studies?
Articulations
Culture, desire and the real
Literary machines
1
4
9
13
15
21
1 Becoming-Modernists: Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and
Gertrude Stein
Becoming, modernism
Barnes, the middle class and the Oedipal family
Intension, extension and Loy’s feminist effects
Stein’s making: progressive verbs, dynamic subjects
27
27
33
41
48
2 The Great War, Hysterical Men and the Modernist Lyric
The Great War and modernist studies
Hysterical men
Death of the literary I
Love and letters: Loy and Stein write war
57
58
63
68
75
3 Dada, Cyborgs and the New Woman in New York
Spectacular, spectacular: Barnes writes New York
The modern woman
Loy, blind men and mechanomorphic women
Cyborg-women making Dada
85
88
95
99
110
4 Fashions for Genius and the Flâneur: A Guide to Paris
Modernism, urbanism and genius
Stunning subjects
118
119
125
vii
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Contents
‘Pablo and Matisse have a maleness that belongs to genius,
Moi aussi perhaps’
Curie of the laboratory of vocabulary
Portraits of the artist
Out of the city
132
136
140
146
5 Carnival Bodies, the Grotesque, and Becoming Animal
Becoming-grotesque and grotesque modernism
Bodies, buttons and cows: Gertrude Stein
From repulsive women to becoming-animal: Djuna Barnes
Urban detritus and the abject: Mina Loy
150
151
157
164
173
6 Wandering and Wondering: Jewish Identity and Minority
Writing
The Jew in the modernist (con)text
Jewish modernism and modernist Jews
‘The Jew’s history a commodity’: Barnes, Nightwood and
the Jew
Anglo-mongrel modernism: Loy and the wondering Jew
Yiddish, Zionism and patriarchy: Stein’s Jewishness
178
179
183
188
192
199
Postscript
207
Notes
210
Bibliography
219
Index
233
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Becoming-Modernists: Djuna
Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude
Stein
[A]ll becomings are already molecular. That is because
becoming is not to imitate or identify with something or
someone. Nor is it to proportion formal relations. Neither of
these two figures of analogy is applicable to becoming: neither
the imitation of a subject nor the proportionality of a form.
Starting from the forms one has, the subject one is, the organs
one has, of the functions one fulfils, becoming is to extract
particles between which one establishes the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness that are closest to what one
is becoming and through which one becomes. This is the sense
in which becoming is the process of desire.
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 272)
Becoming, modernism
Barnes, Loy and Stein pre-exist this present study as modernist figures
as well as embodied subjects who inhabited and wrote within the first
half of the twentieth century. As I am seeking to launch new ways of
considering their work, this pre-existence needs to be taken into account
in an act of dialogue but also in a critical enterprise to draw new lines
of meaning-production and theoretical relation; that is, articulations.
Of the three writers Stein has been most extensively explored and
most extensively reconfigured, shifting between a modernist persona, a
linguistic-poetic innovator and a lesbian-feminist icon. None of these
are sufficient designations, but none of them are completely false either;
‘Gertrude Stein’ has been created in these different guises through
(mostly unacknowledged) critical acts of articulation. As ‘Mother Goose
27
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of Montparnasse’ or the ‘Mother of Dada’, Stein persists in culturalist
accounts of expatriate modernism as a colourful and well-connected
character. Her sexuality becomes integral to her writing in some feminist
and gender studies appraisals of her work, with various versions of
écriture feminine deployed as a theoretical frame for evaluations of her
linguistic experimentation. The lesbian body and lesbian sex can be seen
as keys to understanding texts such as Tender Buttons (1914) but more
recently questions of race and her own relationship to her Jewishness,
have informed Stein criticism.1
Barnes’s modernist presence is founded most strongly on her novel
Nightwood (1936) but the achievement of that work continues to overshadow her other work, indeed her early journalism and short stories
are still often read as preparatory work towards the novel. Examinations
of Barnes’s representation of binaries and dualities, and her relationship
to Decadence or Symbolism, have been present since early criticism of
her work in the 1970s and 1980s and the queering of Barnes, despite
her own rejections of such labels, has inflected many readings. The
tendency towards biographical interpretations, a feature of some of the
criticism of all three writers, has some weight in the case of Barnes with
both her biographers (Andrew Field and Phillip Herring) emphasising
the autobiographical context for Ryder (1928) and many critics seeing
this text and the late play The Antiphon (1958) as based in Barnes’s own
family experiences. Thus issues of incest, rape and the female body are
read through Barnes’s close physical relationship with her grandmother,
the journalist, feminist and spiritualist Zadel Barnes, and her father’s
treatment of her in her youth.2
Like both of the other writers, Loy’s presentation of women’s bodies
and her exploration of female sexuality and creativity have featured
prominently in critical versions, not least because of her explicit engagement with such topics in the Feminist Manifesto (1914) and poems such
as ‘Parturition’(1914). Such an interest in a feminist Loy has run alongside criticism that has sought to examine her through her relationship
to the modernism of her male peers and colleagues, and their forebears – Jules Laforgue, Ezra Pound, the Italian Futurists, William Carlos
Williams, Basil Bunting. Carolyn Burke, most recently with her 1996
biography of Loy, has been very influential in establishing the parameters for criticism with Roger Conover’s editions of her poetry, in 1982
and 1996, bringing Loy into print for the first time since the 1950s.3
Loy’s use of language (which has been compared to Stein’s), her interest
in fashion and her later reclusiveness (which has been linked to Barnes’s
own position), and her position as outcast, most notably in relation
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to her own Jewishness and petit bourgeois upbringing, have all been
instrumental in the construction of a version of Loy.
In exploring the work of Barnes, Loy and Stein, in making a meaningful map of articulations that situate, are productive of, and are
produced by, their work, this study necessarily intervenes in readings of
the three writers that already exist. My purpose is to consider them as
modernists and, in doing so, to re-evaluate the definitions and boundaries of what modernism is. But what I will produce will not be a final
reading, a comprehensive assessment or an absolute idea. The concern
with becoming that motivates this chapter and underpins many of the
conclusions that I will go on to draw throughout this study precludes
the possibility of a final statement of intention or achievement. It is
the process, the line of becoming that matters, not in order to establish points between which the line is drawn, but to reveal the line
itself as a force of speed and intensity which pushes towards a deterritorialisation of affects and codes. I am searching for ways of reading
that resist the closure of theoretical labels and teleologies of traditions
without wanting to reject the specificity of early twentieth-century literature and culture. In opening out the work of Barnes, Loy and Stein
I am seeking not simply to situate them in a context, or relate them
to cultural and artistic events, but to read the event of specific texts
as a force which can take flight from dominant formations, majoritarian structures, a rigid segmentarity which imposes a signifying regime
on bodies, relations and encounters. Becomings as I read them in the
following pages are simultaneously the processes of Barnes’s, Loy’s and
Stein’s work, the affective events of modernist cultural practices, and
the intensities of these events and practices as they can be activated in
the contemporary moment. I am concerned to assess these as haecceities
in the sense in which Deleuze employs this term. Haecceity, derived
from Haecceitas, as Deleuze explained, is ‘a term frequently used in the
school of Duns Scotus, in order to designate the individuation of beings.
Deleuze uses it in a more special sense: in the sense of an individuation
which is not that of an object, nor of a person, but rather of an event
(wind, river, day or even hour of the day). Deleuze’s thesis is that all
individuation is in fact of this type’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987: 151,
n.9). I am therefore seeking to understand, not the style or themes of
the work of Barnes, Loy, Stein and their contemporaries, but its very
individuation.
I am also aware of the potential pitfalls of a faithful application of
Deleuzian method (whatever that is) in a feminist reading of these
modernist writers, particularly as becoming itself seems to be explicitly
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gendered in Deleuze’s work. The argument in A Thousand Plateaus
is that all lines of deterritorialisation go through ‘becoming-woman’,
which is the starting point for the whole process. Becoming-woman,
however, does not refer to actual females, but to affective states and
positions. Deleuze does support a feminist position,4 as the reference to the need for women’s ‘molar politics’ in A Thousand Plateaus
demonstrates (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 276). It is the position
of women within phallogocentrism which has established the preeminence of becoming-woman, as Braidotti argues: ‘the generalized
becoming-woman is the necessary starting-point for the deconstruction of phallogocentric identities precisely because sexual dualism and
its corollary – the positioning of Woman as figure of Otherness – are
constitutive of Western thought’ (2002: 80). However, Deleuze is interested in a non-feminine revolutionary subject; that is, a becomingwoman that is not specifically feminine, ‘dissolving “woman” into the
forces which structure her’ (ibid.: 81). As Braidotti points out Deleuze’s
position suggests a ‘symmetry between the sexes’, he ‘proceeds as if there
was a clear equivalence in the speaking positions of the two sexes and
consequently fails to take into account the central point of feminism’
(ibid.). Or, as Claire Colebrook asks, ‘Just what are Deleuze and Guattari doing when they take Woolf and the women’s movement away
from concepts of identity, recognition, emancipation and the subject
towards a new plane of becoming?’(2000: 3). Feminist appropriations
of Deleuze, by Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz, demonstrate that
the problem of becoming-woman is not insurmountable, but debates
between orthodox Deleuzians, with their critiques of the molar stance
of feminism, and feminist Deleuzians persist. My own use of Deleuze
is far from faithful, co-opting him as I am into a methodological structure that draws on cultural studies and focuses squarely on modernist
literature and culture. As also a feminist methodology, I am working
with the recognition that becomings can be differently gendered; they
can have a different valency and necessity depending on the gender
experience of the becoming-subject, and can have a different urgency
depending on the becoming-subject’s relationship to majoritarian
structures.
There are many ways in which the early twentieth century can be
understood as a potential site for becomings, for lines of speed and affect
that move towards ‘the (anorganic) imperceptible, the (asignifying)
indiscernible, and the (asubjective) impersonal’ (Deleuze and Guattari,
1988: 279). The new century inherited many of the forms and structures
that had developed to both produce and maintain the modern subject
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and his modern society. As Foucault has described, this process does not
solely originate in the Victorian era, nor can it be seen as an intentional
process of the subjugation of the individual (it is productive as well as
restrictive), but by the early twentieth century the normalisation of the
law had produced the modern state, the modern family and modern
sexuality, all focused on the modern subject. Subjectivity as a desiresdriven network of impersonal or machine-like connections is, in the
modern subject, fixed to a supposed One who is normalised into a hierarchical power structure that negates the multiplicity of material and
semiotic conditions that constitute the process of the subject. Normalisation establishes difference in a binary opposition to the Same,
institutionalising a reductive dualism at the core of the subject. So,
the psychoanalytic production of the normal explicitly required the
identification of deviations from the norm through the knowledgeproduction of deviant pleasures and abnormal identities. But, the visibility of such others serves not only to define the self, but to suggest
the permeable boundaries of that self, to pose proximities which put
the self close to others; the tentative becoming-animals of masochism,
the asignifying bodies of hysterics, the machinic delirium of schizophrenics. The regulated man witnesses otherness which may confirm
his-self/same, but which may also force the Same to recognise the other
as an incommensurably different mode of being. The desire to move
beyond the Same and release becomings is a key force in the modernist
impetus.
The regulatory production of a subject, and the corollary urge to
escape this regulation, is accompanied by specific philosophical tendencies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, tendencies
that we could term vitalist. The thought of both Friedrich Nietzsche and
Henri Bergson is crucially influential on modernism, and on the potential for modernist becomings, and is just as important for Deleuzian
ideas of the subject and of heterogeneous multiplicities. But, in articulating a framework for modernist becomings I do not want to prioritise
theoretical structures, as articulation, as I am deploying it, is embedded
firmly in the embodied experience of culture and society. Indeed, the
affective experiences of the early twentieth century are perhaps the most
important for activating and releasing the potential for becoming (at the
level of individual, artistic and cultural production). Advanced capitalism and consumerism, mass-production, technological change, the
modern urban zone, colonial encounters, and the shifts in gender and
class relations are experiences as much as they are social trends. It is a
commonplace to describe modernism as a response to these factors, but
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what I want to consider is how the embodied and embedded experiences
of the early twentieth century produce certain potentials, in the real,
that are realised in modernist literature and culture. I am concerned
with exploring entries and exits rather than structures. Reality manifests
the effect of power at every level, but can only be defined and described
by affect (i.e., the ability to affect and be affected) and it is to this affect
that I turn. Thus the Fordist and Taylorist models of harnessing and
controlling the flows of modernity are principles and theoretical structures but are also affects that produce efficient machines and efficient
human machines of production, explicitly ordering the world of society
and industry and the individual human subject.
The shift from organic work and life that they foreground also signals
a release, for the flows and networks of desire that constitute the
subject, from the constraints of a natural or innate ‘being’.5 The flows of
modernity, made manifest in the city spaces of the twentieth century,
can thus be experienced in their intensity and multiplicity in opposition
to, or even within, the structures that attempt to order them. Capitalism and consumerism, too, harness flows and desires, but in their
actual production of desires again signal a double movement where
the ordering and control of production (the production of goods and
the production of the desire for these goods) highlight the necessary
productivity of desire that easily exceeds the hierarchy of segmentation and majoritarian structures. In this context socialist and feminist
activism can be recast, not as movements towards the rational liberation
of subjects, but as the creation of new types of desiring social production.
The reliance on molar identities in such politics means that they can
easily be captured by an arborescent signifying regime and put in the
service of the (renewed) State, for example, but this does not preclude
the possibility of minoritarian becomings, rejections of the majoritarian subject position, launching from their space. Racial encounters
too, quintessential acts of territorialisation and decoding within the
regimes of Western thought, can also instantiate proximities that trigger
different becomings-other. In my reading, therefore, modernity and its
effects can be seen as the denaturalisation of existence and experience,
the unseating of the sovereign rational subject, and the production in
and of intensitive desires.
The cultural practices of modernity, modernism and the early
twentieth-century avant-garde are themselves complex organisations,
places at which the real effects and investments of power are articulated.
Whether different places produce becomings or re-territorialisation is
something that I am actively exploring here. I am not simply assuming
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that ‘male’ modernism is majoritarian, or that women’s modernism is
minoritarian. In taking on board the pre-existing versions of Barnes, Loy
and Stein, I am crucially concerned to resist a generalised celebration
of an alternate or ‘other’ modernism that the three writers either
define or participate in, whether this is defined through assertions of
‘non-heterocentric existence’6 or political generalisations about textual
form. The methodology of articulation is what will enable me to assess
moments and texts as specific mobilities, rather than general processes.
As I have already stated, in considering Barnes, Loy and Stein as
becoming-modernists in this chapter, becoming is not cast as an end
but as a process. I do not intend to start at a beginning and trace faithful
origins out of their background, education or upbringing; instead I will
take a moment – 1913 – and explore each of their becoming-modernisms
out of this moment/place. 1913 is an arbitrary year; it does not have
the huge cultural resonances of ‘1914’, but in its very arbitrariness I
am seeking to avoid the idea of an accurate ‘return to the scene of
the modern’, to use a phrase from Michael North’s Reading 1922. The
remainder of this chapter will therefore be drawing a map through and
across texts by Barnes, Loy and Stein, locating them, not in an accurate
and complete cultural and aesthetic context, but in an active map of
articulations so that I can explore their becoming-modernisms, and I
can establish some of the ideas that will recur through this study. Ideas
themselves are lines of intensity: I am not looking for stable concepts
(which would be contradicting a Deleuzian approach) but the singularities of thought-events, where thinking is recognised as doing and
thought as difference.
Barnes, the middle class and the Oedipal family
On 19 March 1913, Barnes left the Pratt Institute art school in Brooklyn,
New York, after less than six months of classes, almost the full extent
of her formal education. At about the same time she moved out of the
Bronx flat she shared with her mother and younger brothers, and began
to pursue a career as a freelance journalist. Barnes was hired as a reporter
for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, where her first articles appeared in June 1913
by which time, aged 22, she was resident in a Greenwich Village flat. By
Christmas 1913 Carl Van Vechten hired her to write for the New York
Press and over the following years her journalism, short stories, poems,
drawings and one-act plays appeared in most of the major New York
papers and in the avant-garde small magazines The Trend, Others and
the Little Review. Barnes was a resident of the Village for the next eight
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years, during which time she was engaged to Ernst Hanfstaengl (from
1914–16), a German-American gallery owner; lived with the socialist
writer Courtney Lemon (from 1917–19); and had affairs with Van
Vechten, Mary Pynne and others. By 1917 her journalism and other
writing were earning her up to $15 a piece (an annual income of about
$5000).
As a popular features writer – covering topics as diverse as Tango
dancing, Coney Island, women’s suffrage, Chinatown, theatre, and
soldiers in New York – and interviewing subjects from Diamond Jim
Bradley to Helen Westley, the labour activist ‘Mother’ Jones to Alfred
Steiglitz, Barnes’s journalism positioned her within the new world of
mass newspapers. Journalism across the Anglo-American world, fundamentally affected by changes in production, presentation and distribution techniques, had undergone a transformation with the late
nineteenth century seeing the rise of visually accessible sensational
newspapers and ‘yellow journalism’. It is within this field of cultural
production that Barnes writes, adopting the roles and subject matter
suited to it. Katherine Biers describes how Barnes inhabited ‘a varied
repertoire of roles for her public from flamboyant female “stunt journalist” and investigative reporter in the tradition of Nellie Bly to straightforward chronicler of local color and notable events around the city’
(2003: 239). Barnes, in earning her living in New York in the 1910s,
firmly participates in the popular world but, despite her marginalisation from mainstream critical accounts of the Greenwich Village avantgarde,7 she was also a member of this bohemian community, playing a
key role, for example, in the founding of the Provincetown Players. Her
short stories, poems and one-act plays engage with many of the stylistic
and thematic features that predominate in the writing of the New York
avant-garde at the time, and proffer an interesting articulation to the
legacy of decadence and symbolism.
The Greenwich Village that Barnes settled in already had a reputation as a bohemian area with, from 1910 onwards, a huge influx
of artists, writers, intellectuals and single women following the early
bohemians who were drawn to this Italian area by the subdivision
of redbrick residences and mews into cheap rooms and studios. The
Village became a centre for experiments in art, politics and life, celebrated in the galleries, restaurants and small periodicals of the American
avant-garde, and publicised for tourists by enterprising individuals like
Guido Bruno. 1913 was a turbulent year for the Village avant-garde
community. It saw both the Armory Show (the International Exhibition
of Modern Art at the 69th Regiment Armory) in February which brought
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the furthest reaches of the European artistic avant-garde to an American
public, and the mobilisation of socialist intellectuals, artists and writers
in support of the strike at the Paterson silk factory in New Jersey, culminating in the huge Paterson Strike Pageant in Madison Square Garden
in June.
Barnes was not a major player in these key events by comparison with
Mabel Dodge, for example, who founded her reputation as avant-gardist
and patron on the Armory Show and supported her lover John Reed’s
activities on behalf of the Paterson strikers. However Barnes’s early
journalism does demonstrate an interest in the experiences of working
people and in modern art. The July 1914 issue of Alfred Steiglitz’s Camera
Work included Barnes’s statement on the meaning of the 291 Gallery,
and her ‘Veterans in Harness’ series in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (from
October to December 1913) explored the lives of a postman, a waiter,
an elevator operator and a physical culture teacher. The ‘Veterans in
Harness’ articles demonstrate Barnes’s particular style, opening as they
do with a specific dramatic ‘Scene’ that acts as the background for
each ‘Veteran’, and subtly combining impressions of the economic and
political changes the men have experienced with their personal and
family stories. Many of the elderly men are immigrants, arriving during
the great wave of immigration of the late nineteenth century, and the
issues of race, employment and American history are all presented as
constituent of each man’s character and their place in New York. This
Naturalist approach to character and life coexists in Barnes’s New York
journalism with elaborate visual metaphors and similes: the engineer
Thomas Baird stands near the docks ‘among the many doors and the
many high stools that lean against the walls like sad and world-wise
herons’,8 the fire-fighter Michael Quinn is imagined spending his evenings ‘supervising the rising of the asbestos curtain of the last act of
life wherein there are ballet girls and nights at home’.9 Throughout,
Barnes’s reporting voice is present in an editorial tone of knowledge
and interpretation, and it is this aspect of her feature writing, Douglas
Messerli argues, that influences the style and construction of her early
stories which ‘through informational asides, directions to the reader,
and other narrational manipulations, expose the author as the source of
the story, as the apparent agent of a series of shared events’(1993: 17).
Barnes’s early stories, published in All Story Cavalier Weekly, The Trend,
and the New York Morning Telegraph Sunday Magazine between 1914
and 1917, also share some of the character-typing and deterministic
facets of her journalism (notably in the representation of race and racial
heritage), but this early work cannot simply be categorised as Naturalist.
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Barnes is certainly closer to Theodore Dreiser than James Joyce in her
resistance to deep psychological explanation and emphasis on event,
but her avant-garde work is set apart by her stylisation and artifice, the
unresolved plot of many of the stories, and the special emphasis on
‘beauty’, ‘cowardice’, ‘sensitivity’ and ‘freedom’ as intensive, affective
states.
Barnes’s early stories, like her journalism, are produced out of a specific
milieu. They may not have the fundamental impulse of being produced
from contemporary events, as the journalism necessarily does, but are
still the products of, and with, a context that can make the work meaningful, but which is also produced by the works themselves. Thus the
tension in America between liberalism and conservatism within reform
movements, the visibility of race and immigration in New York, the
influence of the tradition of paternalistic reform, the perpetuation of
female virtue and nurturance as ideals in American feminism, are all
social forces that can be articulated to Barnes’s journalism and early
stories, but are also forces that are articulated by her work in her attempt
to make intelligible a specific conception of the world. They come to
Barnes, not as abstract social forces, but as the particularities of her
experience as a child in the polygamous household of her New England
radical father and feminist spiritualist grandmother, and as an inhabitant of the Brooklyn and Greenwich Village of immigrant New York.
As a particular American subject, and as a particular woman in the city
of New York, Barnes draws specific forces together. Thus, in writing
and reporting New York, Barnes articulates and produces an inhabited
city whose meaning is struggled for by a broad range of populace and
visitors. In this she engages with the public act of making race and
nationality meaningful, of articulating them into the intelligibility of an
individual or area. But this reported New York, and Barnes’s journalistic
texts themselves, are also a space of visible spectacle. In articulating New
York to its readers and to the events and forces that shape it, Barnes’s
journalism self-reflexively considers the mechanisms of the spectaclem
particularly the way that the spectacular moment places certain forces
in evidence while making others invisible.
Many commentators have noticed the prevalent interest in feminism
and the position of women in Barnes’s journalism, but the status of
the key terms (of ‘women’, ‘feminism’), how they are made intelligible and what narratives they connect with is paramount. Her early
writing evinces a suspicion of middle-class reformism and even her
endorsements of freethinking are accompanied by a recognition that
individualistic radicalism can also harbour paternalistic and restrictive
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imperatives.10 In her articles on National American Women Suffrage
Association events in 1913, Barnes presents neither an endorsement
nor rejection of the movement, but does highlight how spectacle and
presentation are emphasised to foreground personality and style, rather
than politics and effects. It is given to the 82-year-old labour activist
Mary (‘Mother’) Jones, in a 1915 interview, to actively dismiss the
American suffragette in her fashionable hobble skirt as ‘an ‘incher’ ’ (NY:
99). For Mother Jones the suffragette ‘incher’ is on a continuum with
the other charitable associations of America – ‘relief work made possible
by slavery’ (NY: 102). In contrast to the fashionable suffragette, Mother
Jones is a minoritarian force, ‘born of the struggle and the torment and
the pain’ (NY: 97), she has ‘never had time to become individual’ (NY:
103) and persists at the molecular level of a ‘remedy’ (NY: 97) rather
than an individual. Just as interesting is Barnes’s piece ‘How It Feels to
Be Forcibly Fed’ (September 1914) in which she undergoes the forcefeeding process inflicted on hunger striking British suffragettes, offering
her own body as an object taken over by the irresistible force of the
fluid nourishment that chokes her nose and throat. In its re-enactment
of the suffering of Barnes’s British ‘sisters’ this article is political, at the
level of immanent experience or the localised and affective point of
conjunction between forces: feminist resistance and state power. And
in the article’s status as popular entertainment, complete with photographic display of the ordeal,11 it furthermore interrogates the cultural
construction of the feminine body as vessel or object of resistance and/or
assault.
In the short story ‘Paprika Johnson’, first published in The Trend in
January 1915, Barnes explores, as she does in other stories, the position
of the single woman and her relationship to the expected roles of wife
and mother. Paprika is an attractive and generous stenographer who
is also an artist (she plays Chopin on her banjo and appreciates the
aesthetics of the evening city scene from her fire escape). She misses
her chance of the traditional happy ending with the ‘boy from Stroud’s’
through helping her ‘bosom friend’ Leah continue to deceive her new
husband – the blind Gustav has married Leah thinking she has the charm
and generosity of Paprika, who agrees to be the person he sees when he
regains his sight after an operation. ‘Paprika Johnson’ presents sets of
social codes and structures against which Paprika’s nascent becoming
is explored; she is abstractly contained by the codes of decency and
virtue by the presence of her ‘moribund mother’ who lies ‘under the
counterpane, a chaperon who never spoke or moved since she was paralysed, but who was a pretty good one at that, being a white exclamation
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point this side of error’ (S: 36). This startling metaphor exposes the rigid
construction of codes of femininity that contain Paprika and her friend
Leah while also revealing its rigid constructedness, its status as a textual
curtailment of potentiality. Paprika and Leah are also defined and coded
by their position in the urban economy, by their jobs and homes, by
Paprika’s ‘one-fifty “American Madame” ’ (S: 41) and Leah’s ‘forty-ninecent belt’ (S: 45). But the city itself as a zone of denaturalised becomings
is perceived as a place of beauty by both Paprika and the narrative voice:
‘Across the cliff she looked and watched the moon grope its way up
the sky and over condensed milk signs and climb to the top of the
Woolworth building’ (S: 37).
The status of paralysis and blindness is crucial in this story, associated
as it is with the male characters (Gustav and the boy from Stroud’s who
has only seen Paprika in ‘silhouette’ from a distance), and the mother
figure of feminine propriety. It marks, not the boundaries of true seeing,
but the impossibility of accurate perception from within the majoritarian structures of patriarchy, the family and the state. Against these
structures Paprika is a potential who fails (despite her aspirations) to be
captured into an appropriate feminine subjectivity, ending instead as
the ‘first cabaret artist’ (S: 46), playing her banjo from her fire escape
for the patrons of Swingerhoger’s beer garden below. The story struggles
to present Paprika as haecceity, a specific and singular event, just as she
struggles to produce her own intensities out of the codes and structures
that define her as a subject. What the story presents is not simply a negotiation of early twentieth-century urban milieux in which ‘liberated’
working women struggle with the traditional expectations of femininity alongside the economic pressures of modern life, but a consideration of identity as the chance production of the forces and flows of
desire.
Paprika’s final fate as a cabaret artist does see her launched, however
unintentionally, on a line of flight out of the bourgeois institutions of
marriage and family, but this is not to fix such a position as an ideal exit
from norms of femininity. In the penultimate poem from Barnes’s The
Book of Repulsive Women, there is a Cabaret Dancer who is subject to the
controlling gaze and opinion of her audience who, in their attraction to
her increasingly repulsive dislocation from acceptable femininity, push
her towards ruin. The audience’s complicity in the dancer’s descent into
dissolution and self-destruction is fully acknowledged. The unavoidable presence of a complex desire (the audience’s, the dancer’s, the
reader’s) produces the dancer as repulsive woman from what is previously ‘laughter’ and innocence. The Book of Repulsive Women, published
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by Guido Bruno in 1915, presents a variety of ‘portraits of women in
states of physical and moral degeneration’ (Parsons, 2003: 15) of which
the Cabaret Dancer is one, but which also include a prostitute, a lesbian,
female suicides and a woman who has had an abortion. The book draws
on the decadent tradition in both its representation of abject femininity (in the poems and Beardsleyesque drawings) and its anti-bourgeois
stance, proffering these repulsive women as evidence of alternatives to
the clean, straight aspirations of modern America. The use of decadent
rhetoric is apparent elsewhere in Barnes’s journalism and in some of her
one-act plays, and it does manifest a desire to prepare the ground for a
radical, anti-bourgeois sensibility. But Barnes’s decadence is also a refusal
of an easy realism or a psychological realism, and it sets these works apart
from a rhetoric of progressive radicalism as well as alienating them from
a tradition of middle-class reform. The decadent encounter with otherness, most explicit in the moment of becoming-other, is paramount in
Barnes’s reproduction of it, a movement out of rational subjectivity into
decay, death or animality.
Decadence was not just a cultural heritage that Barnes could connect
with, but a personal one that emerges from her grandmother Zadel’s
presence in British fin-de-siècle decadent circles. This family connection
forges an interesting articulation, as what Barnes’s short stories and
plays also effect, and what emerges from The Book of Repulsive Women,
is a disturbance of the Oedipal family through tropes of incest and
dead fathers. Thus, for example, the three Carson brothers in the play
Three from the Earth (1919) visit Kate Morley, the erstwhile lover of their
dead father, to retrieve letters from him. The play concludes with the
youngest brother John, who is probably Kate’s son, incestuously embracing and kissing her. The Dove (1926) powerfully satirises the aspirations
to corruption and perversion of the Burgson sisters with their garishly
voluptuous apartment and (unfulfilled) decadent desire. The demur
young woman, the Dove, who stands as the child-lover in the Burgson
sisters’ would-be degenerate household, actually threatens the myth of
the household by realising their professed desires – wielding swords,
enacting a lesbian-vamp bite on Amelia Burgson, and finally shooting
the Burgson’s picture of ‘Deux Courtisanes Vénitiennes’ (RS: 161). In
all these actions she blurs distinctions between binaries (masculine –
feminine, hetero – homosexual, active – passive, aggressive – defensive)
and refuses her role in the mock family.
The rejection of the Father and the subversion of family and normative desire in Three From the Earth and The Dove produce an anti-Oedipal
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flight out of the restrictive structures of desire and the individual figured
through castration and loss: these texts are not bound up by narratives
of lack and guilt. Anti-Oedipal desire in Barnes’s writing is powerfully
productive, but also ambivalent and disturbing, productive of death, of
mute becomings-animal and decay as often as productive realisations
and intersections. The little girl, a liminal space before the actions of
gender and acculturation act to create Woman, is key to Barnes’s subversion of the Oedipal family and her rejection of the narrative of lack
that underpins the phallogocentric folly of patriarchal culture. In her
later works Ryder and The Antiphon, the actions of this culture on the
little girl, the forced containment of her as passive vessel for the actions
of the male (as cultural and as individual force), are imagined as the
actual (incestuous) rape of the female child: the disruptive potential of
the little girl is also explored in Barnes’s stories from the 1920s, and of
course in plays such as The Dove. The little girl emerges from these texts
as an ambiguous in-betweenness that confuses the rigid segmentation
of genders, behaviours, individuals:
girls do not belong to an age, group, sex, order, or kingdom: they
slip in everywhere, between orders, acts, ages, sexes; they produce
n molecular sexes on the line of flight in relation to the dualism
machines they cross right through. The only way to get outside the
dualisms is to be in-between, to pass between, the intermezzo.
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 277)
In stories such as ‘Cassation’ (originally published as ‘A Little Girl Tells
a Story to a Lady’ [1925]) and ‘The Grande Malade’ (originally published
as ‘The Little Girl Continues’ [1925]) the little girl refuses narrative
expectations about cause, effect and role. What comes to prominence in
these stories is the girl herself, ‘her speed, her freely machinic body, her
intensities, her abstract line or line of flight, her molecular production,
her indifference to memory, her nonfigurative character’ (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1988: 277). The little girl has not (not yet) been captured
by a psychoanalytic narrative of the mournful and negative desire to
enslave the other to a specular reflection of the subject, trapped into a
family romance that always constructs her as incomplete and subject
to the desire of and for the Father. She signals a becoming in Barnes’s
text, a potential that could escape and take flight beyond the Oedipal,
bourgeois family: hers is an inbetweenness that is reflected in Barnes’s
own status both inside and outside the modernist avant-garde.
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Intension, extension and Loy’s feminist effects
In January 1913 the journal Lacerba was founded in Florence, and within
two months was propounding many of the Futurist principles that
F. T. Marinetti was popularising across Italy and presenting in London
and Paris. In November a Futurist art exhibition of the work of Boccioni,
Balla, Carrà and others was held in Florence, followed by a heavily
attended Futurist serata in December which was a typical cross between
theatrical event and riot. At this time Mina Loy was living on the Costa
san Giorgio in Florence as her first marriage to Stephen Haweis deteriorated – in February 1913 he left for the South Sea islands without Loy
and their two children. Loy was in the middle of one of her recurrent
bouts of neurasthenia, something that she hoped her recent discovery
of Christian Science would help her with, but during the following
months encounters with a range of figures and forces would produce the
affective force that propelled Loy onto a line of modernist becoming.
Loy had been a friend of Mabel Dodge (who occupied the nearby
Villa Curonia during her Italian summers) for some years and had
met Leo and Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas at Dodge’s villa, striking
up an acquaintance with the two women that would extend into the
Paris of the 1920s. It was through Dodge that Loy met John Reed
and Carl van Vechten when they visited the Villa Curonia in the
summer of 1913. Van Vechten would fictionalise his holiday in the
1921 bestseller Peter Whiffle, but crucially their meeting provided Loy
with an agent who would go on to place her work in the New York
small magazines The Trend, Rogue and Others. Loy was thus exposed
to the forces of Greenwich Village radicalism through Dodge and
her guests, as well as already having encountered Stein’s writing (The
Making of Americans and ‘Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia’)
and being, although now distantly, still connected to the Parisian art
world: she exhibited a painting and three drawings at the 1913 Salon
D’Automne.12
Like Barnes, the deployment of the visual and verbal rhetoric of decadence was a feature of Loy’s early modernism and their production of it
coincides in the adoption of a pre-existing rhetoric for anti-bourgeois
art. But whereas Barnes’s decadence is a self-conscious deployment
of tropes with a key intention of resisting the rhetoric of her American context, Loy’s decadence marks a more straightforward rebellion
against a middle-class Victorian background that was also to resonate
in her personal life: her choice of Haweis as lover and husband appears,
through the frame of his presentation as ‘Esau’ in her long poem
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Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose (1923–25) to be a choice of decadence over
bourgeois sensibility. However, Loy’s ‘Three Moments in Paris’ sequence
shares with Barnes’s ‘To A Cabaret Dancer’ a sense of the destructive
effects of the decadent aesthetic expectations of an audience, both works
being published in New York in 1915. In Café du Néant’ (the second
poem of ‘Three Moments in Paris’), a cabaret-café is populated by the
etiolated, degenerate and ‘nostalgic’ ‘baited bodies’ of decadent stereotypes who watch a performer:
Who
Having the concentric lighting focussed precisely upon her
Prophetically blossoms in perfect putrefaction.
(LLB: 17)
In the autumn of 1913, through her young boarder the American
painter Frances Stevens, Loy encountered the Futurist movement. She
became acquainted with Carlo Carrà and Giovanni Papini on their visits
to the Costa san Giorgio, met Marinneti when he visited Florence, and
would come to have a brief affair with Marinetti and a more complicated involvement with Papini. For the Futurists, and most forcefully
for Marinetti, modern literature, art and culture needed to reject the
passeist elements of nostalgic European culture, throw off the burdens
of artistic tradition and embrace the new rhythms and forces of speed
and technology. Marinetti’s manifesto urgings to ‘Burn the museums’
and ‘murder the moonshine’, to expose the reality of sex, to revel in the
machinic forces and flows of modernity, to celebrate ‘war, the world’s
only hygiene’, and to liberate language into a parole-in-libertà, are radical
articulations of a modernist sensibility that embraces the shock of the
new. Loy’s own embracing of this sensibility was first manifested in
‘Aphorisms on Futurisms’ published in Camera Work in 1914, but as
her ‘Feminist Manifesto’ demonstrates, she also responded to the problematic gender politics of futurist ideas, particularly Marinetti’s disprezzo
della donna (scorn for women), the ninth tenet of The Founding and
Manifesto of Futurism (1909). As will be discussed in the next chapter,
Marinetti’s futurist rhetoric seeks to construct a defence of a masculinity
that was threatened by those very forces (technological advance, war)
that futurism also celebrates. Loy’s ‘Feminist Manifesto’ echoes the iconoclastic tone of the futurist manifestos, but also resonates with contemporary debates about the roles and rights of women, particularly in sex
and reproduction, that were occupying bohemian and other radicals on
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both sides of the Atlantic. In opposition to the purity reform movement,
Loy’s call for the ‘surgical destruction of virginity’ and insistence that
‘there is nothing impure in sex’ (LLB: 155, 156) seeks to disengage feminine
identity from female chastity, but she also celebrates maternity, with
eugenicist undertones to her embrace of reproduction. As Paul Peppis
highlights, Loy is engaging, along with figures such as Margaret Sanger
and Marie Stopes, in the attempt to ‘modernize gender by rewriting sex’
(2002: 566), and like Barnes, Loy is suspicious of a feminist movement
that would perpetuate traditional roles for women and fail in addressing
the need for a revolution in consciousness.
The mixture of futurist and feminist ideas and approaches which are
articulated through the becoming of Loy’s modernist aesthetic can be
seen in her earliest poetry publications. In ‘Italian Pictures’, the sequence
of three poems published in The Trend (November 1914), Loy offers
striking verbal collages of Italian life and society which exemplify her
experiments in form and subject matter. Loy’s attraction to Italy derived
from the vitality and directness she perceived in Italian life, a complete
contrast to the repression and denial of Victorian England, and in these
pieces Italy functions as the source both of an inspiring dynamism and
openness, and a dangerously seductive lack of control. This tension
intersects with Loy’s concern about the limitation of dualistic gender
roles through her resistance to the association of the female with natural,
elemental abandon. Elizabeth Arnold argues that Loy’s reaction to what
she saw as ‘something inherently primitive about the Italians that both
fascinated and repulsed her’ mirrored her attitude toward the Futurists
(1989: 105).
In the first poem in the ‘Italian Pictures’ trilogy, ‘July in Vallombrosa’,
Loy juxtaposes Britain with Italy through images of rigid motionlessness and the purging of a dynamic polytheistic nature. The immobility of trees and the paralysis of death stands in macabre contrast to
the dynamic rhythm and syntax of Loy’s poem, and to the Italian
vitality and physicality. The British opposition to a principle of vitalism
presented in this poem can be articulated to Barnes’s ‘Paprika Johnson’,
in which paralysis and blindness signal the impossibility of dynamic
existence within the majoritarian structures of family or state.
In the following poem in the trilogy, ‘The Costa San Giorgio’, Loy’s
use of alliteration, typographical innovation, and disjunctive syntax and
images, all apparent in ‘July in Vallombrosa’, become a central element
of the poem’s purpose. Loy offers a turbulent and dynamic piece of
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‘Italian life-traffic’ (LLB: 10) in a form which attempts to reproduce the
spontaneity and simultaneity of its subject:
Oranges half-rotten are sold at a reduction
Hoarsely advertised as broken heads
BROKEN HEADS
and the barber
Has an imitation mirror
And Mary preserve our mistresses from seeing us as we see
ourselves Shaving
ICECREAM
Licking is larger than mouths
Boots than feet
Slip Slap and the string dragging
And the angle of the sun
Cuts the whole lot in half
(LLB: 11)
This strophe opens with a metrically regular line, a tetrameter
of dactyl, trochee, dactyl, trochee, followed by an irregular line in
which the idiosyncrasies of language are emphasised by Loy’s transliteration of the orange-seller’s vernacular proclamation, ‘Oranges’
‘advertised as broken heads’. Any remnant of rhythmic regularity is
completely disrupted by the repetition of ‘BROKEN HEADS’, the uppercase emphasis halting the flow of the poem and emphasising the volume
and sound of the orange-seller’s voice. These various formal strategies
invoke the presence of the orange-seller without the use of description
(except for the adjective ‘Hoarsely’ to describe his/her voice) or other
literary conventions. The poem turns, mid-line, to focus on a ‘barber’,
a free association of ideas and sensations which mirrors the movement
of consciousness – ‘BROKEN HEADS’ leads to ‘the barber’ conceptually
(head/hair/barber) and aurally (with the alliteration on ‘b’). The barber
provides another ‘voice’ from the street; the communal voice/thought of
his customers presented in a quotation of their cultural idiom, ‘And Mary
preserve our mistresses from seeing us as we see ourselves’. Another free
associative leap goes from ‘Shaving’ to ‘I C E C R E A M’ (shaving/shaving
cream/ice cream) with the line reproducing the design and emphasis
of the advertising board. This leads into a conceptual and ocular juxtaposition of images (‘Licking is larger than mouths/ Boots than feet’),
enhanced by the onomatopoeic and visual presentation of footsteps ‘Slip
Slap’. The strophe ends with a painterly description which translates
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the stark juxtapositions and rapid shift of images and sensations into
a contrast of light and shadow. This verbal collage is not static or two
dimensional though. As signified by the present-tense verbs and present
participles, Loy intends to represent a continuous, dynamic experience
of Italian life.
In the final poem of the ‘Italian Pictures’ sequence, ‘Costa Magic’,
Loy confronts familial and patriarchal structures. Through the trope of
a ‘magical’ curse the poem constructs the abstract functioning of these
structures in the oppression of women. The father of a young woman
Cesira, jealous of her proposed marriage, condemns his daughter to
death through a curse. The ‘Viscuous/ Malefic’ (LLB: 13) potion that he
pours to make his daughter ill has a clear hint of incestuous desire and/or
jealousy (amplified by the implications of the neologism ‘viscuous’)
which becomes explicit by the end of the poem:
It is unnatural in a Father
Bewitching a daughter
Whose hair
down covers her thighs
(LLB: 14)
As in some of Barnes’s writing, incest here functions to express the
capture and destruction of the girl/daughter by the Oedipal family, the
negation of her becoming by her inscription into a reductive narrative
of familiar and familial desire and taboo. ‘Costa Magic’, as do Loy’s other
early poems, also invests itself in the material and semiotic conditions
of the female subject, representing her body as intelligent matter with
the capacity to affect and be affected, as a slice of forces with a process
of desire, a becoming that the dualistic machine would condemn to
rigidity and death.
Loy’s 1914 poem ‘Parturition’ functions most expressly through
writing out (of) the forces that constitute the body and the extension of those forces in the action of desire and the intermingling
with others. As the title suggests, the becoming that emerges from
the poem is a becoming-woman but the text’s concern is not to
establish an essentialist definition of femininity: just as Barnes’s ‘How
It Feels to Be Forcibly Fed’ discovers in the extremis of the female
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body an asubjective, anorganic movement, in ‘Parturition’ the subject’s
construction is dissolved into relations of speed and proximity:
I am the centre
Of a circle of pain
Exceeding its boundaries in every direction
The business of the bland sun
Has no affair with me
In my congested cosmos of agony
From which there is no escape
On infinitely prolonged nerve-vibrations
Or in contraction
To the pin-point nucleus of being
Locate an irritation without
It is
within
Within
It is without
The sensitized area
Is identical
with the extensity
Of intension
(LLB: 4)
In one set of articulations ‘Parturition’ responds to the Futurist’s ideas
about women, especially those expressed through Marinetti’s image of
the ‘closed circle’ employed in ‘Against Amore and Parliamentarianism’.
The circle of female being may at one point be ‘congested’, but in this
experience it is also one that opens out to external forces, that moves
and fluctuates, blurring the distinction between ‘within’ and ‘without’.
The embodied consciousness of the parturient woman, in the intensity
of the experience, extends into the particles and flows of life. The words
‘extensity’ and ‘intension’ are key here: intension is both the intensity
of the experience (content) and the intensional force (form) of the
embodied consciousness, while the extensity is the spatial expansion of
the experience (including that of the poetic line as its length fluctuates
in the poem) and also the comprehensive dispersion of subjectivity as
the One disintegrates into ‘sensation’ and ‘forces’.
Life is central to the poem – the word is repeated seven times – and this
life is a Nietzschean or Bergsonian vitalism, connected to dynamism,
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intension and extension. In considering life, Loy demonstrates how
the experience of giving birth opens the woman up to the universe of
desiring production, of birth, life and death. Thus she presents images
of life, a ‘cat/ With blind kittens’ (LLB: 7); of life-in-death, a ‘dead white
feathered moth/ Laying eggs’ (LLB: 6); and of death, a ‘small animal
carcass/ Covered with blue – bottles’ (LLB: 7). She even identifies a
parturient woman with a ‘wild beast’ (LLB: 5) but similarly disturbs the
inviolate humanity of man with the ironical use of the words ‘Brute’
and ‘male’ (LLB: 5). Such images figure an extension towards becomingother, towards an absorption into an ‘infinite’ ‘cosmic’ process, into
‘LIFE’ (LLB: 6). This moving beyond is the destruction of the self as a
bounded circle; the local experience of ‘Maternity’ is equal to a boundless ‘infinite Maternity’ (LLB: 6). The infinity that is discovered is a
perpetual motion not a goal, indicated by ideas of ‘Unfolding’ (LLB: 7)
which echo the earlier inside/outside interconnectedness.
In ‘Parturition’ Loy attempts a linguistic enactment of childbirth,
rather than a simple reflection or mimetic reproduction of the experience (as perhaps the ‘fashionable portrait-painter’ in the poem does in
his representational art). Using the innovations of modernist poetics, her
aim is to evoke affectively the disjunctions, extremities and realisations
of parturition, not offer a semantically intelligible description. However,
the becoming that the poem realises is circumscribed by majoritarian
structures and dualistic decodings of woman that seek to assert the
‘superior Inferiority’ of women, containing the potential of childbirth
within a narrative of feminine sacrifice and subservience. Thus the poem
closes with an ironic reference to the machines of Christianity:
I once heard in a church
– Man and woman God made them –
Thank God.
(LLB: 8)
Loy’s modernist becoming, in ‘Parturition’, ‘Italian Pictures’ and other
early work, establishes itself through an obvious proximity to Italian
Futurism, reproducing but also reconfiguring it in the mechanics of her
texts. There is also an obvious proximity to a range of other ideas about
modern consciousness and the modern sexual subject, all of which are
particularly inflected by a proximity to woman as a mobile category of
relations and roles. In Loy’s early texts, therefore, becoming-modernist
and becoming-woman are inseparable, but in doing this Loy is not
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essentialising female experience as ‘other’ (modern), or production as a
‘natural’ process. Instead, it marks the threshold from which the stratified subject can open out to the flows of desire and production, to the
affective force of (literary) creation.
Stein’s making: progressive verbs, dynamic subjects
In 1913 Gertrude Stein, with her brother Leo, had been in residence
at 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris for ten years; Alice B. Toklas had been
living permanently with them since 1910. During this time the Steins
had amassed an impressive collection of modern art which hung on the
walls of the atelier and attracted many visitors to the regular Saturday
evenings there. Beginning with Leo’s purchase of an early Cézanne landscape in 1903 and including other Cézannes, as well as Renoir, Gauguin
and Toulouse-Lautrec, the Steins collected French, Spanish, German and
English modern art. In 1905 Leo and Gertrude bought Matisse’s Woman
with a Hat for 400 francs, and soon after the atelier walls began to fill
with Fauve landscapes. Later that year Gertrude met Picasso for the first
time and began what would be a life-time friendship by sitting for a
portrait during the winter and spring of 1905–06; Picasso went on to
complete the portrait without his sitter in the late summer of 1906 after
a visit to Spain, famously painting a mask-like face that looked ahead to
cubism.
By 1913 Stein had been exposed not only to the forces of cubism,
but to most of the forces of the volatile Parisian art and cultural scene,
including the Italian Futurists during one of Marinetti’s visits to Paris
in February 1912. In 1913 itself Stein and Toklas visited London, in
search of publishers for Stein’s work, attended the second evening of the
controversial Rites of Spring, spent the summer in Spain, as they had done
for the first time the previous year, and following Leo’s final retreat from
the rue de Fleurus, found themselves living alone as a couple in their
own home as they would do for the rest of their lives. 1913 was also the
year that Stein, by an introduction through their mutual friend Mabel
Dodge, met Van Vechten, who was to be even more important to her
literary career than he was to the launching of Loy’s. She also met Francis
Picabia on his return from the New York of the Armory Show, and his
colleague Marcel Duchamp, described in The Autobiography of Alice B.
Toklas as ‘looking like a young Norman crusader’(A:146). The work that
she produced at this time can be put into productive contiguities with
this range of meetings, particularly to a New York context that may not
seem immediately applicable.
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Stein’s situation in 1913 could be contrasted with that of either Barnes
or Loy. At least a decade older than either of the other women (Stein
was 39), she had an independent income sufficient to sustain her household and this, along with her education as a philosophy and psychology
student at Radcliffe (the Harvard Ladies’ Annex) and at Johns Hopkins
School of Medicine, sets her apart from both Barnes and Loy. Moreover,
Stein’s engagement with the visual arts was as a collector and salon
hostess, rather than practitioner, and while she was at the scene of the
emergence of cubism in the work of Picasso and Braque, Barnes and
Loy connected in their early work to an alternative avant-garde nexus
of decadence. They found different propulsions to modernism (Barnes
through popular urban culture, Loy through futurism), while Stein is
often either seen as a singular innovator, creating her own form of
semiotic modernism, or as strictly tied to the avant-garde ruptures of
cubism. However, as Barnes’s writing on Greenwich Village bohemia
demonstrates, the distinction between different modernist ‘movements’
is elided by the fact that the anti-bourgeois rhetoric of the avant-garde
shares a powerful molecular impulse, a primary direction against a stratification and coagulation of cultural forces.
Contrasting these women writers is not a sufficient way of understanding the different articulations that produced their becomingmodernism, or of reading a field of effects that is articulated to and
by their work in 1913 and after. 1913 has been seen as a point of
consolidation for Stein, both personally and aesthetically: she throws
off the influence of her brother Leo and establishes herself in a lesbian
couple with Toklas, and has adumbrated (by Tender Buttons) all the major
premises of her experimental work (present-tense vision, rejection of
habitual associations, subversion of the discursive order of language)
that would be expressed, elaborated and explained in her subsequent
writing. Such an account imposes an internal coherence and teleology
on Stein’s writing, and negates the possibility for continuous differencein-repetition, it is fundamentally at odds with the very present-tense
vision of her writing through the 1910s to 1930s. Such a teleological
account also tends towards a validation of the ‘abstractionist’ label that
has dogged Stein,13 and ignores the productive and effective engagement with reality in Stein’s texts, or even the attempt in some of these
texts to ‘be’ the real in and of itself. Resisting teleological accounts, the
analysis being undertaken here is one that reads texts not as a development of a personal aesthetic, but as events that forge connections and
alignments, as actions ‘situated in social, institutional, and conceptual
space’ (Grosz, 1995: 126).
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In 1913 Stein was at the beginning of her career as a published writer,
although she had completed a number of longer works and shorter
pieces, some of which would be published in the 1922 Geography and
Plays. The vanity publication of Three Lives by the Grafton Press in
New York had been Stein’s only appearance in print before 1912, but
in the summer of 1912 two of her portraits ‘Henri Matisse’ and Pablo
Picasso’ were published in Steiglitz’s Camera Work. This marked a turning
point for Stein’s public reputation, which was augmented in 1913 by
the publicity that Mabel Dodge aroused with her private publication
(bound in Florentine wallpaper) of Stein’s ‘Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the
Villa Curonia’ that she distributed at the New York Armory Show. The
‘Portrait of Mabel Dodge’ was then reprinted in a Camera Work special
number in June which further draws Stein into an articulation with the
New York avant-garde, an articulation that persists in the Stein’s lending
of Matisse’s Woman with a Hat for the Armory Show. Dodge’s involvement with this show was a textual intervention, as much as financial or
organisational participation, and it was one that produced a modern(ist)
identity for herself (as the subject of Stein’s portrait) as well as producing
a modernist context for Stein. The comments on, interest in and satirising of Stein’s ‘Portrait’ reinforced the presentation of Stein that Alfred
Steiglitz had already offered, describing her texts as ‘a decipherable clew
to that intellectual and aesthetic attitude which underlies and inspires
the [modernist] movement.’14 As a becoming modernist, enmeshed in
the Parisian art scene, Stein was emerging in New York as a modernist
innovator and one with an audience that was being constructed through
the events associated with Greenwich Village. The direction of her work
at this point is a response to the possibility of an (American) audience,
a deliberate turn towards an external public.15
At this point Stein had already completed two of her major works,
Three Lives (originally entitled Three Histories) and The Making of Americans, a manuscript that Dodge had greatly praised and had also been
read by Loy, but which did not find a publisher until 1925 (having been
serialised in The Transatlantic Review the previous year). These texts have
been open to an enormous variety of interpretations, and have preoccupied much of Stein criticism, each analysis attempting to establish
the influences and epistemologies they express, and their role in the
development of Stein’s aesthetic (and in many cases feminist politics).
In a refusal of such tactics of deep expositional reading and, with an
attention to my focus on 1913, I wish instead to extract from Three Lives
and The Making of Americans a sense of the mechanics of Stein’s texts.
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Three Lives is most often seen as a literary attempt to approximate
the impressionist and post-impressionist mechanics of Cèzanne
(in ‘The Good Anna’), Matisse (in ‘The Gentle Lena’) and Picasso (in
‘Melanctha’), with Flaubert’s ‘Un Coeur Simple’ serving as the instigation for the initial story.16 The discontinuous episodic narratives of the
stories and the increasing use of repetition are seen to mark Stein’s first
attempt at a realism that would bring to literary realisation a Jamesian
conception of consciousness wherein a rejection of habitual perceptions
is paramount. In ‘Melanchtha’ this realism comes to the fore, both as the
‘colloquial realism’ of dialectical speech which pervades the narrative
idiom, and as the repetition which produces the contrasting rhythms
of Jeff Campbell and Melanctha. Whether or not Stein is being cubist
or Jamesian is not as important as the fact that the real in this story is
apprehended and produced through this repetition which embodies the
rhythm of the life process as continuous happening, a flow of being.
The linguistic production of the flow of being is achieved by Stein’s
use of the ‘continuous present’. What this actually refers to is the
omnipresent deployment of the present participle, accompanied by
gerundal constructions that express permanent action. In the huge work
The Making of Americans the continuous present emerges through the
attempted history of the Hersland and Dehning families. Repetition lies
at the core of this text’s attempt to classify the ‘bottom nature’ of character, a classifying, comprehensive and stratifying desire that struggles
against a simultaneous pure desire in/of repetition, repetition as pure
difference and delight:
Mostly every one loves some one’s repeating. Mostly every one then,
comes to know then the being of some one by loving the repeating
in them, the repeating coming out of them. There are some who love
everybody’s repeating, this is now a description of such loving in one.
Mostly every one loves some one’s repeating. Every one is always
repeating the whole of them. This is now a history of getting
completed understanding by loving repeating in every one the
repeating that always is coming out of them as a complete history of
them. This is now a description of learning to listen to all repeating
that every one always is making of the whole of them.
Now I will tell of the meaning to me in repeating, of the loving
there is in me for repeating.
Always from the beginning there was to me all living as repeating.
This is now a description of loving repeating as a being. This is now
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a history of learning to listen to repeating to come to a completed
understanding.
(M: 294)
The text produces ‘loving repeating’, ‘living as repeating’ that is emerging, ‘always coming out of them’. Instead of a fixed ‘description’
or an incremental substitution that produces a final sense of character and history, the ‘repeating’ is the ‘being’. Thus, as Jane Walker
describes, ‘repetition, not a linear sequence of discrete events linked in
a chain of causality that manifests progress, is the form and force of
history in Stein’s text’ (1984: 43). As can be seen in this extract the
‘now of the discursive moment’ is what the text struggles to articulate,
demonstrating through the ‘unusual usage of [knowing, understanding,
thinking] normally stative verbs as verbs of activity that knowledge, in
this text, is not a static state but a temporal process occurring within the
ongoing present of the discourse’ (ibid.: 52). Knowledge is a process, just
as being is a process, just as the text is a processual, situated, temporal
force.
This text only moves towards, rather than fully realises a ‘completed
understanding’. As Lisa Ruddick points out in a very interesting feminist
reading of The Making of Americans, three narrative voices can be
discerned which ‘engulf and include each other in turn’: the ‘bourgeois
chronicler’ a good son recording middle-class life, the ‘psychological
theorist’ who attempts to illustrate a theory of human nature, and the
‘intimate voice of a hypnotized producer of sentences with moods and
bodily rhythms of her own’ (1990: 67). These voices share the space of
the text, and can be articulated to different intellectual, personal and
social forces, but what Ruddick’s analysis does highlight is the struggle
between the voice(s) and the paternal rule that seems to forbid the
emerging process of this text.
A key passage from the ‘Alfred Hersland and Julia Dehning’ chapter of
The Making of Americans presents what Ruddick describes as a ‘murderous
fantasy’ (1990: 109) of killing an incestuous father:
There was a man who was always writing to his daughter that she
should not do such things that were wrong that would disgrace him,
she should not do such things, that he was her father and was giving
good moral advice to her and always he wrote to her in every letter
that she should not do things that she should not do anything that
would disgrace him. He wrote this in every letter he wrote to her,
he wrote very nicely to her, he wrote often enough to her and in
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every letter he wrote to her that she should not do anything that
was a disgraceful thing for her to be doing and then once she wrote
back to him that he had not any right to write moral things in letters
to her, that he had taught her that he had shown her that he had
commenced in her the doing the things that would disgrace her and
he had said then when he had begun with her he had said he did it
so that when she was older she could take care of herself with those
who wished to make her do things that were wicked things and he
would teach her and she would be stronger than such girls who had
not any way of knowing better, and she wrote this letter and her
father got the letter and he was a paralytic always after, it was a shock
to him getting such a letter, he kept saying over and over again that
his daughter was trying to kill him and now she had done it (M: 488–9)
The nexus of writing, sexuality, incest and authority that this extract
articulates produces a sense of the protagonist (‘she’) destroying the
limitations (on her desire and writing) that are literally embodied by
her father. In paralysing/killing the incestuous father the morality (the
structures and codes) he reiterates are revealed in their immobility as
the writing-self takes flight from them. Connections can be drawn here
to the incestuous father of Loy’s ‘Costa Magic’ and the dead fathers of
Barnes’s early writing – what such connections produce is a fictional
image of a repressive paternal-machine that captures the female subject,
codifying her desire in an Oedipal triangle. It is only in a violent deterritorialisation of desire from this Oedipal machine that the becomingwoman, becoming-writer can be launched.
As she completed The Making of Americans Stein was also devising
portraits wherein the shift from narrative and history to an attempt to
write the unmediated continuous present of an individual can be seen:
‘Ada’ for example moves from a narrative text of repetition to a final
paragraph of present participle ‘loving repeating’. If The Making of Americans seeks to connect with and produce an American context, as the title
implies, Stein’s portraits of the artists, acquaintances and scenes of her
Paris life are not necessarily a break with this Americanness. She writes
later of the subjects of her portraits as a generation that ‘has conceived
an intensity of movement so great that it has not to be seen against
something else to be known, and, therefore, this generation does not
connect itself with anything, that is what makes this generation what it
is and that is why it is American, and this is very important in connection with portraits of anything’ (Stein, 1985: 98–9). This generation and
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Stein’s portraits are articulated to an Americanness that indicates their
dynamism and difference.
It was her portraits, that create an unmediated reality and the pure
difference of being, that brought Stein to her audience and they thus
figure as the hinge between Stein’s verbal experiments and a public
emergence. Alongside the portraits of Matisse, Picasso and Dodge that
appeared in Camera Work in 1912 and 1913 respectively, ‘Aux Galaries
Lafayette’ was published in the inaugural issue of Louise and Allen
Norton’s Rogue (March 1915). Soon after, Stein’s ‘M. Vollard et Cézanne’
appeared in the New York Sun (in October 1915) and ‘Mrs Th——y’ in
The Soil in 1916; even Stein’s play ‘IIIIIIIIII’ was edited down to the
‘speeches’ of M—N H—. (Marsden Hartley) to appear as a portrait of
the painter in Hartley’s exhibition catalogue and in the New York Sun
when his exhibition opened in January 1914. Many of Stein’s portraits
function with a very limited lexicon, a sparse deployment of adjectives, an objectival use of ‘thing’ or ‘something’ rather than specific
concrete nouns, and they are pervaded by progressive verb forms.
The portraits are real productions of and with their subjects: they are
not representational, they are not sound games (though the surface
texture is crucial in the production of the rhythms of recurrence of the
subject), but they are real in that they seek to produce the effect of
the subject and to signal the existence of that subject as a temporal,
dynamic and progressive process: they produce ‘a rhythm of the visible
world’ (A: 130)
By the time of writing her ‘Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa
Curonia’, Stein had explored a range of literary mechanisms for evoking
the presence of a subject, but it was Dodge’s publicity efforts with
this text, publicity for her own modernist-becoming as much as for
Stein’s literary experiments, that brought this text into conjunction
with a context beyond Stein’s own personal one. The ‘Portrait of Mabel
Dodge’ is neither a typical nor exceptional ‘example’ of Stein’s modernist
becoming. But as an event that articulates this becoming to an American audience and to an American and European artistic avant-garde,
constructed by the moment of the Armory Show and its subsequent
place in art-historical accounts, the ‘Portrait of Mabel Dodge’ is incredibly productive.
‘Portrait of Mabel Dodge’ offers a welter of objects, rooms, passions
and activities without, as in the other portraits, making any direct
reference to person or thing. In producing the presence of Dodge
and her Villa Curonia, the portrait uses the recognisable features of
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Stein’s writing: incremental repetition, rhyme, an emphasis on present
participles, gerundial constructions and indefinite pronouns:
In burying that game there is not a change of name. There is not
perplexing and co-ordination. The toy that is not round has to be
found and looking is not straining such a relation. There can be that
company. It is not wider when the length is not longer and that does
make that way of staying away. Every one is exchanging returning.
There is not a prediction. The whole day is that way. Any one resting
to say that the time which is not reverberating is acting in partaking.
(SW: 466)
The effect is certainly a sense of presence, but also an indication of
the kineticism and heterogeneity of life, embodied in the Portrait by
its subject. Lois Palken Rudnick writes that ‘it is obvious that Gertrude
found in Mabel the kind of discontinuous motion and ever life-renewing
energies that she associated with being American’, and that Dodge was
‘delighted with her portrait’ (1984: 51). Stein’s text is full of energy,
emphasises activity, refuses quantification and stresses relations and
proximities. Whether or not there is the biographical information to
show that Stein, working at night at her writing, was privy to Dodge’s
nocturnal adventures with her son’s 22-year-old American tutor, or
that there was a sexual tension between Stein and Dodge,17 the text is
permeated by an indiscriminate desire (for subjects, objects and states of
being) and yearning for pleasure: ‘This is the bliss’ (SW: 466). In this the
Villa and Dodge exist as an epitome of a fully sensuous experience, ‘the
stuff’ that occupies the ‘space’ of the portrait, the villa, the people in the
villa (SW: 468). The text strives towards an approximation of energetic
processes of life at the same time that its matter and form recognise frustration, discontinuity and incompletion: ‘There is that desire and there
is no pleasure and the place is filling the only space that is placed where
all the piling is not adjoining’ (SW: 467). The portrait closes with an
acknowledgement of the impossibility of actually capturing and fixing
a full heterogeneous presence: ‘There is not all of any visit’ (SW: 468).
In the chapters that follow New York will be returned to (in Chapter 3),
as a potential scene for the modern, though any exemplary status for
this place is undermined by the succeeding chapter’s turn to Paris in the
1920s. Offering such an articulation, however contingent, in New York
in 1913 certainly shifts the focus away from the events in Europe in 1914
which have so often come to stand as a necessary and sufficient causality
for modernism for both male and female writers. I want to refuse this
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causality, but at the same time to consider how the forces and effects of
the 1914–18 European war could have been configured in experimental
texts of the time. The war does not instigate modernism, or modernist
becomings, but its event can be articulated in useful ways to the events
of a range of texts. For Stein the period of her portraits, at the end of and
beyond the completion of The Making of Americans (about 1910 to 1913),
also saw the emergence of her interest in writing plays, an interest that
is linked both to a comprehension of the externality of affect (figured
as landscape) and to the compulsion to violent interactions in this field
of affect (war): ‘she says a landscape is such a natural arrangement for a
battlefield or a play that one must write plays’ (A: 145).
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Index
Abraham, Julie, 189, 190
Ajeeb Chess Player, 88, 213n6
Aldington, Richard, 58
Anti-Semitism, 133, 139, 179, 180,
183, 191, 193, 194, 199, 217n4
Ardis, Ann, 11
Arensberg, Louise, 97, 105, 115
Arensberg, Walter, 99, 101, 105, 115
Armory Show, 34, 35, 48, 50, 54, 99
Arnold, Elizabeth, 43
Arnold, Matthew, 179
Art Nouveau, 128
articulation, 14–16, 20, 21–5, 31, 33,
150, 208–9
Ashbery, John, 204
assemblage, 18, 21, 23, 24, 121–2,
125, 132, 135, 149, 152, 177, 182,
187, 210n7
avant-garde, 5–6, 9, 20, 25, 32–6 , 49,
50, 54, 71, 86, 92, 95, 114–17,
118, 123, 127, 128–32, 142–4,
146, 186, 195, 197
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 152–4, 156, 166
Barnes, Djuna, 1–4, 23–6, 29, 33–43,
126–9, 143–9, 164–73, 188–92,
208, 209
and avant-garde, 40, 87, 91, 92, 97
and Barney, Natalie Clifford, 167
and baroque, 191–2, 198
and becoming-animal, 170, 172
and carnivalesque, 165–6
on Coney Island, 34, 89–91, 164
and Decadence, 34, 29, 127, 147
on fathers (dead), 53, 59
and female body, 28, 37, 164,
165–6, 167
and feminism, 36–7
and First World War, 58, 61
friendship with Loy, 1, 2
and Freytag-Loringhoven, Baroness
Elsa von, 93, 116
on genius, 144–7
and gothic, 151
and Greenwich Village, 33, 34, 36,
91–4, 97
and grotesque, 164–5, 167–9, 175,
177
and Guggenheim, Peggy, 127
and Hanfstaengl Ernst, 34
and incest, 45
and Joyce, James, 143–7
and Jewishness, 25, 178, 188–92,
194, 200
journalism, 24, 25, 28, 34–6, 39, 88,
93,126–7, 160, 147–8
and Lemon, Courtney, 34
and mass culture, 87, 91–2, 165
poetry by, 2, 33, 34, 38, 60, 127
plays by, 2, 28, 34, 39–40
and Provincetown Players, 34
and Pynne, Mary, 34
Ray, Man photograph of, 128, 129
short stories, 28, 33, 34, 37–8, 40,
126–7
on Stein, Gertrude, 192
and suffrage movement, 37
and Van Vechten, Carl, 33
writing on Mina Loy, 95
Barnes, Djuna, works by,
The Antiphon, 2, 28, 40, 192, 216n10
‘Becoming Intimate with the
Bohemians’, 91, 95
The Book of Repulsive Women, 38–9,
165–6, 168
‘Cassation’ (‘A Little Girl Tells a
Story to a Lady’), 40
‘Creatures in an Alphabet’, 216n10
The Dove, 39–40
‘Flo Ziegfeld Is Tired of Buying
Hosiery’, 94
‘The Grande Malade’ (‘The Little
Girl Continues’), 40
‘Greenwich Village As It Is’, 91,
‘How It Feels to Be Forcibly Fed’, 37,
45, 94, 164
233
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Barnes, Djuna, works by – continued
‘How the Villagers Amuse
Themselves’, 92, 93
‘If Noise Were Forbidden at Coney
Island a Lot of People Would
Lose Their Jobs’, 89
‘I’m Plain Mary Jones of the U.S.A.’,
37
‘James Joyce, A Portrait of the Man
Who is, at Present, One of the
More Significant Figures in
Literature’, 143–5
‘Just Lately Drummer boy’, 89
Ladies Almanack, 2, 3, 165, 166,
167–8, 173, 174, 192
‘The Last Petit Souper (Greenwich
Village in the Air – Ahem!)’, 91
‘The Models Have Come to Town’,
147
‘My Adventures Being Rescued’, 94
‘My Sisters and I at a New York
Prizefight’, 94
Nightwood, 25, 28, 151, 164, 165,
166, 169–73, 188–92, 194
‘Paprika Johnson’, 37–8, 43
‘The People and the Sea’, 89
Ryder, 28, 40, 165, 166–9, 170
‘Seeing New York With the
Soldiers’, 57, 60–1
‘Surcease in Hurry and Whirl: On
the Restless Surf at Coney’, 89,
90–1
Three from the Earth, 39
‘The Tingling, Tangling Tango as
‘Tis Tripped at Coney Isle’, 89
‘ “Twingeless Twitchell” and His
Tantalizing Tweezers’, 94
‘Vagaries Malicieux’, 146–7
‘Veterans in Harness’, 35
‘When Emperors Are Out of Men!’,
88
‘Who Shall Atone?’, 89
‘The Wild Aguglia and Her
Monkeys’, 94
‘Yvette Guilbert’, 94
Barnes, Zadel, 28, 39
Barney, Natalie Clifford, 118, 119,
137, 138, 148, 167
baroque, 191–2, 198
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Baudelaire, Charles, 120–1, 124, 140
Bauman, Zygmunt, 179
Beach, Sylvia, 123
Beard, Charles, 94, 97
becomings, 17, 19–21, 24, 27, 29–30,
99, 125, 191, 206, 207
horizon of, 84
and minor language, 182
becoming-animal, 31, 40, 155–6,
161–4, 168–70, 172, 173, 177,
186, 187
becoming-grotesque, 151–7
becoming-insect, 79
becoming-machine, 98, 105
becoming-minoritarian, 199
becoming-woman, 30, 45, 47, 53, 111,
113, 155, 156, 206, 207
Benjamin, Walter, 120, 122, 124
Benstock, Shari, 6
Bergson, Henri, 31, 46, 136
Biddle, George, 93
Biers, Katherine, 93–4
biography, 1, 2, 23, 28, 55, 80, 116
Birmingham Centre for Cultural
Studies, 13
Blind Man, The 100–2, 103, 114
Blind Man’s Ball, 154
Booth, Allyson, 59, 61
Botticelli, Sandro, 114
Bouché, Louis, 93
Bourdieu, Pierre, 7, 12, 24, 122–4
Bourke, Joanna, 62
Bowen, Elizabeth, 124
boxing, 141–2, 164–5
Boyle, Kay, 119
Bradbury, Malcom, 120
Bradbury, Malcolm and James
McFarlane, 5
Braidotti, Rosi, 30, 84, 87, 111, 113,
124, 132
Brancusi, Constantin, 140
Bridgman, Richard, 122
Brittain, Vera, 63
Brown, Robert Carlton, 90, 101 110
Bruno, Guido, 34, 39, 91
Bunting, Basil, 28
Bürger, Peter, 5
Burke, Carolyn, 28, 77–8, 115, 144,
157
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Burton, Robert, The Anatomy of
Melancholy, 166
Butts, Mary, 184, 186
Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The, 151
caesar salad, 83
Camera Work, 25, 42, 50, 54, 95, 114
capitalism, 17, 24, 86, 103–4, 122–3,
135, 148, 198
carnivalesque, 2, 25, 148, 150, 152–3,
156, 165, 174–5, 190
Carrà, Carlo, 41, 42
Cèzanne, Paul 70, 73
Chancellor, John, How to Be Happy in
Paris Without Being Ruined, 122
Chaplin, Charlie, 104, 140, 141, 175
Charcot, Jean-Martin, 64, 65
Charm, 147, 198
Chessman, Harriet Scott, 158
Cheyette, Brian, 180, 181, 183, 184
Christian Science, 41
cinema, 8, 103, 104, 137, 148, 172,
175, 176
circus, 165, 170, 190
colonial encounters, 31
Comentale Edward, 11, 211n5
Coney Island, 34, 88–90, 101, 114,
164
‘Flip-Flap’ rollercoaster, 114–15
Connor, Steven, 184
Conover, Roger, 28, 69, 96, 102, 141
consumerism, 24, 31, 32, 66, 86, 108,
114, 118, 132, 151, 175
Cook, George Cram, 95–6
Cravan, Arthur, 77, 103, 142
Criterion, 72, 163–4
Crowninshield, Frank, 97, 98, 101
Crozier, Andrew, 187
cultural capital, 24, 122, 124, 127,
129, 132, 140, 142, 145
cultural studies, 8–13
cummings, e.e., 58, 113, 121, 198
Cunard, Nancy, 127
Curie, Marie, 138–9, 215n17
cyborg, 24, 111, 113, 115, 116
Dada Almanack, 114
Damon, Maria, 181, 201
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235
Decadence, 28, 34, 39, 41, 42, 49, 73,
91, 98, 127, 143, 144, 166, 168
Deleuze, Gilles, 29, 30, 191, 192
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari,
17–23, 26, 27, 30, 40, 75, 76, 82,
105, 155, 161, 162, 172, 173, 177,
181, 182, 192, 204
Anti-Oedipus, 19
A Thousand Plateaus, 19, 20, 30, 155
Demuth, Charles, 101, 102,
103, 116,
desire, 18–20, 55, 71, 77, 159, 173,
176, 206
anti-oedipal desire, 40, 53
Decadent desire, 39
fields of, 153
flows of, 48, 66, 81, 150, 195
and the grotesque body, 154, 163
materiality of, 80
and subjectivity, 31, 32, 38, 169
desiring machines, 18, 149
desiring production, 18, 19, 21, 22,
23, 32, 47, 63, 66, 67, 75, 120,
155, 160, 192
deterritorialisation, 17, 19, 24, 29, 30,
53, 67, 75, 111, 118, 135, 148–9,
154, 162, 173, 181, 184, 185, 192,
198, 206, 208
Dietrich, Marlene, 172
Dodge, Mabel, 35, 41, 48, 50, 54, 55,
76, 95, 158
Dreier, Katherine, 113
Dreiser, Theodore, 36
Dreyfus Affair, 180
Dressler, Marie, 175
Duchamp, Marcel, 24, 48, 99–100,
101, 102, 103–4, 105, 111, 113,
115, 116, 130
as Rrose Sélavy, 104
Duchamp, Marcel, works by
Bicycle Wheel, 103, 111
The Bride Stripped bare by Her
Bachelors, Even (Large Glass),
104–5
Fountain, 99–100, 130
In Advance of the Broken Arm, 103
Nude Descending a Staircase, 99, 104
Traveller’s Folding Item, 111
Duncan, Isadora, 98
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Dunn, Susan E., 176
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 183, 193, 198
Edmunds, Susan, 166
Edison, Thomas, 111, 112
Eilshemius, Louis, 101
Eliot, T.S., 2, 3, 5, 11, 23, 25, 58, 59,
60, 67, 71, 72, 74, 84, 124, 138,
156, 163, 173, 174–5, 183, 186,
188, 193
‘A Cooking Egg’, 183
After Strange Gods, 183
‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein
with a Cigar’, 183
‘Gerontian’, 183
‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, 71
‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales’,
183
The Waste Land, 58, 72, 74, 124, 156
Elliot, Bridget and Jo-Ann Wallace, 7,
123, 135, 143, 147
Ellis, Havelock, 191
Ellman, Maud, 72, 183
family (Oedipal), 18, 19, 33, 39, 40,
43, 45, 65, 111, 170, 177, 182,
192, 198
fashion, 28, 37, 47, 92, 108, 110, 116,
119, 126, 127, 128, 130, 131, 135,
148, 149, 175–6
Feldman, David, 179
Felski, Rita, 9–10, 11, 86
female grotesque, 148, 153–4, 156
femininity, 38, 45, 63, 65, 86, 94, 97,
104, 110, 111–12, 113, 114, 117,
128, 131, 133, 147, 148, 165, 167,
195, 197
feminism, 2, 3, 6, 10, 11, 16, 17, 25,
27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 36, 37, 43, 50,
52, 86, 155, 157, 159, 164, 174,
184, 192, 197, 204
First World War, 23, 24, 56, 57, 58–63,
65, 66, 67, 70–1, 72, 73, 75, 76,
77–8, 80, 81, 82, 84, 150, 151,
156, 171, 174, 185, 194, 203, 208
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 119
flâneur, 24, 119, 120–2, 124–5, 128–9,
130, 132, 140, 141, 142, 146, 147,
148–9
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flâneuse, 121, 124
Flanner, Janet, 119, 127
Ford, Ford Maddox, 58, 126
Ford, Henry (Fordism), 32, 90, 108,
112, 194
Foucault, Michel, 12, 20, 21, 31, 151
Freedman, Jonathon, 183
Freud, Sigmund, 18, 23, 62, 64, 65,
66, 67, 87, 164, 190, 207, 208
Freytag-Loringhoven, Baroness Elsa
von, 24, 93, 94, 113, 115–17, 126,
148, 155, 176
God, 116
Limbswish, 116
Friedman, Susan Stanford, 6
Frost, Elizabeth, 164, 193, 197
Fussell, Paul, 58–60, 61, 70
Gammel, Irene, 116
Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, 72,
Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound, 130
gender studies,7, 10,
genius, 24, 72, 96, 122, 124, 125, 126,
129, 130, 137, 138–41, 142, 142,
144–5, 146, 147, 148, 149, 180,
194, 196, 203
Gibson Girl, 214n24
Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar, 7,
62–3
Good Housekeeping, 112
gothic, 2, 125, 150, 151–2, 154, 156,
157
Gourmont, Remy de, 74
Greenberg, Clement, 4
Greenwich Village, 33, 34, 36, 41, 49,
50
Grossberg, Lawrence, 11, 14–19, 20,
21, 22
Grosz, Elizabeth, 30, 49
grotesque, 25, 150, 152–7, 158, 160,
162–70, 174–7, 185, 186, 197, 208
grotesque body, 152–4, 155, 157, 160,
163, 165, 166, 169, 175, 176
Gubar, Susan, 130
Guggenheim, Peggy, 126, 127
haecceity, 29, 38, 125, 137, 155, 160,
161, 185, 190, 205
Hall, Radclyffe, 63, 127
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Hall, Stuart, 12–14, 16, 165
Hanrahan, Mairèad, 190, 191
Hanscombe, Gillian and Virginia L.
Smyers, 6
Haraway, Donna, 111
Harlem Renaissance, 210n2
Haweis, Stephen, 41, 60, 194
H.D., 6–7, 198
Hemingway, Ernest, 119, 157
homoeroticism, 69, 70
Howe, Irving, 4, 5
Huyssen, Andreas, 5, 6, 7, 8, 86–7, 128
hysteria, 31, 64, 65–6, 70, 72, 80, 111,
164
L’imagarie populaire (1926), 168
incest, 28, 39, 40, 45, 52, 53
Independents Exhibition (1917), 85,
99–100, 101, 102, 103, 114
individuation, 29, 161
intensities, 20, 21, 22, 29, 38, 40, 46,
75, 79, 81, 84, 90, 125, 135, 162,
163, 164, 173, 188
intermezzo, 40, 196, 202, 204
Italian Futurists, 3, 21, 23, 28, 41, 42,
43, 46, 48, 68, 69, 77, 96, 136
Jacob, Mary Phelps (Caresse Crosby),
110
James, Henry, 5, 51, 180
Janet, Pierre, 64
jeune fille américaine, 105, 108
Jewishness, 25, 28, 29, 90, 133, 138,
171, 176, 178–206, 207, 208
Jones, Amelia, 60, 103, 104, 116, 155
Jones, Ernst, 65
Jones, ‘Mother’, 34, 37
jouissance, 6, 162
Joyce, James, 5, 7, 11, 36, 59, 118,
119–20, 124, 130, 140, 143–7,
156, 170, 183, 184, 186, 194
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man, 119
Dubliners, 183
Ulysses, 25, 124, 156, 170, 184
Kafka, Franz, 181–2
Kaivola, Karen, 191
Kant, Emmanuel, 16, 21
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237
Kayser, Wolfgang, The Grotesque in Art
and Literature, 152–3, 156
Kenner, Hugh, 7
Kiki of Montparnasse, 147
Kouidis, Virginia, 75
Kreymborg, Alfred, 98, 197
Kristeva, Julia, 60, 154, 156, 182
Lacan, Jacques, 18, 207
Lacerba, 41
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry, 210n1
Lawrence, D. H., 5, 22, 151
Sons and Lovers, 151
Lawson, Peter, 185, 187
lesbian erotic, 80, 81, 159, 162, 163
Levenson, Michael, 7
Levin, Harry, 4, 5, 6,
Levine, Gary, 201
Lewis, Wyndham, 12, 59, 138, 140,
186
Levy, Julien, 127
literary machine, 21, 26
little girl, 40–1, 167
Little Review, The, 33, 96, 116, 143,
186, 196
Lombroso, Cesare, 180
Loy, Mina, 1–4, 41–8, 75–80, 84, 95–9,
127–9, 136–43, 173–7, 192–9,
200, 208, 209
ageing women, 148, 176,
and avant-garde, 125–6, 128, 131
and Barney, Natalie Clifford, 137
on Brancusi, Constantin
on boxing, 141–2
and carnivalesque, 174, 175
and Carrà, Carlo, 42
and Chaplin, Charlie, 141
and Christian Science, 41
on cinema, 175
and Cravan, Arthur, 77, 142
on Curie, Marie, 138–9
daughters of (Joella and Fabienne),
127
and Decadence, 41–2, 128
and Dodge, Mabel, 41, 95
and female body, 45–6
and First World War, 25, 57, 58, 63,
75–8, 98
on flapper generation, 128
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238 Index
Loy, Mina – continued
friendship with Barnes, Djuna, 2, 3
friendship with Stein, Gertrude, 1,
41
on genius, 24, 118, 136, 139, 140–2,
143
and grotesque, 156, 174–7
and Guggenheim, Peggy, 127
and Haweis, Stephen, 41, 194
and Independents Exihibition
(1917), 114
and Italian Futurists, 3, 23, 41,
42–3, 95–6, 136
and Jewishness, 25, 178, 192–9,
200, 206
and Joyce, James, 140, 143, 145–6
lampshades, 127
on Lewis, Wyndham, 140
logopoeia, 188
and Marinetti, F. T., 42, 46, 96
as ‘Modern Woman’, 97
mongrel poetics, 193
and Moore, Marianne, 188, 198
and New York Bowery, 176
and New York Dada, 24, 87, 101–2,
103
and Papini, Giovanni, 42
as ‘Patience Scalpel’, 173–4
on Poe, Edgar Allan, 140
Ray, Man photograph by, 128, 129
and Rodker, John, 196
and Stein’s writing, 1, 41, 136–9
and Stevens, Francis, 41
and Van Vechten, Carl, 41, 95
and virginity, 43, 108–9
visual art by 41, 114, 177, 211n12
Loy, Mina, works by:
‘An Aged Woman’, 176
Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose, 42, 177,
192–7, 198
‘Aphorisms on Futurism’, 42, 95
‘Apology of Genius’, 140–1, 144
Bums in Paradise, 177
‘Babies in Hospital’, 77
‘Chiffon Velours’, 176
Christ on a Clothesline, 177
Communal Cot, 177
‘Crab Angel’, 174–5
‘Der Blinde Junge’, 76
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‘Feminist Manifesto’, 28, 30, 42,
173–4
‘Film Face’, 175
‘Gertrude Stein’, 137–8
‘Giovanni Franchi’, 96,
Goy Israels, 193
‘Hot Cross Bum’, 177
‘Human Cylinders’, 99
‘Idiot Child on a Fire-Escape’, 176
‘Ignoramous’, 141
‘Italian Pictures’, 43, 47; ‘Italian
Pictures’: ‘Costa Magic’, 45, 53;
‘Italian Pictures’: ‘Costa San
Giorgio’, 43–5; ‘Italian Pictures’:
‘July in Vallombrosa’, 43;
‘Joyce’s Ulyssses’, 145–6
‘Lady Laura in Bohemia’, 148
‘Lions’ Jaws’, 145
Love Songs, 24, 63, 75, 76, 77–80, 82,
84, 98–9
‘Lunar Baedecker’, 128
Lunar Baedecker, 128
‘Modern Poetry’, 198
No Parking, 177
‘O Hell’, 128
‘O Marcel - - - otherwise I Also Have
Been to Louise’s’, 101–3
‘Mass Production on 14th Street’,
176
‘The Pamperers’, 139
‘Parturition’, 41, 66–9, 95
‘Perlun’, 141–2
‘Photo After Pogrom’, 176
‘Sketch of a Man on a Platform’, 96
‘Three Moments in Paris’: ‘Café du
Néant’, 42, 122
‘To You’, 193–4
‘Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots’,
108–9
Loy, Myrna, 175
lyric voice, 58, 68, 71, 72, 73, 74, 80,
84
McAlmon, Robert, 119, 128
majoritarian, 17, 22, 24, 29, 30, 32,
33, 38, 43, 47, 111, 113, 115, 135,
152 207, 182, 185, 190, 192, 193,
198, 199, 202, 204, 205, 206
see also molar
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Marcus, Jane, 164, 171, 191, 210n2
Marinetti, F. T., 23, 41, 42, 46, 48, 67,
68–70, 74, 96, 108
Marsh, Edward, 185, 197
Marxism, 11, 14, 17, 78, 103
masculinity, 23, 24, 42, 58, 60, 62, 63,
65, 67, 69, 70–1, 74, 86, 104, 130,
133, 142, 149, 151, 191
mass culture, 5, 6, 24, 86, 87, 91, 92,
103, 108, 112, 114, 174, 213n4
materialism, 8, 17, 22, 78
Matisse, Henri 48, 51
Woman with a Hat, 48, 50
mecanomorphic portraits, 105–8
Messerli, Douglas, 35
Meyer, Agnes Ernst, 114
Miller, Cristanne, 188, 193
Miller, Tyrus, 171
minor literature, 181–2, 208
minoritarian, 17, 24, 32, 33, 37, 177,
178, 182, 184, 192, 197, 198, 199,
206
see also molecular
Modernism/modernity, 8
modernist studies, 6, 8–10, 12, 13, 21,
209
molar, 17, 18, 19, 22, 30, 32, 68, 71,
75, 77, 81, 99, 111, 155, 168, 184,
204
see also majoritarian
molecular, 17, 18, 22, 27, 37, 40, 49,
68, 155, 156, 187
see also minoritarian
Moore, Marianne, 188, 198, 216n11
Mutt, R., 99, 101, 214n19
Muybridge, Eadweard, 104
Myers, Dr C. S., 64
Naturalism, 35
Naumann, Francis, 101, 104, 110
New England radicalism, 36
New Woman, 24, 105, 110–11, 113,
114, 117
New York Dada, 24, 85–7, 93, 99, 102,
104–8, 113, 115, 116, 118, 130,
150, 156
New York Society for the Supression
of Vice, 97
Nietszche, Friedrich, 20, 31, 36
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239
Nijinsky, Waslav, 98
Nobel Prize, 139
nomadism, 19, 81, 181, 187, 190, 196,
203, 206
North, Michael, 9, 11, 33
Norton, Allen, 54, 90, 95, 103
Norton, Louise, 54, 95, 101, 102
organism, 18, 63, 66, 67, 113, 154,
162, 186
orgasm, 80, 83, 159, 169, 162, 164,
177
Others, 33, 41, 95, 98, 99, 196
Owen, Wilfred, 67, 70, 74,
Owens, David, 80–1, 82
Papini, Giovanni, 42, 77, 96
Paris, 125, 146–9, 186, 199
Italian Futurists in, 41, 48
guides to, 122
lesbians in, 148–9, 167
in the 1920s, 24, 55, 118, 119, 120,
126–8, 131, 150
Paris Exposition (1878), 112
Rodker, John, in, 186
Stein, Gertrude in, 23, 48, 80, 126,
129–30, 199
Parsons, Deborah, 39, 124–5
Passos, John Dos, 119
paternalistic reform, 36
Paterson Strike Pageant, 35
patriarchy, 10, 16, 17, 38, 40, 45, 159,
168, 174, 104–6
Patterson, Ian, 187
Perelman, Bob, 132, 133, 134
Perloff, Marjorie, 68, 71, 193
phallic poetics, 74, 133
phallus (great castrated soaring), 75
Phillips, Adam, 185
photography, 37, 65, 94, 98, 101, 104,
105, 128, 129, 130, 143, 176
Picabia, Francis, 24, 48, 85, 101,
105–8, 110, 113, 114, 116
De Zayas! De Zayas!, 214n23
Fille née sans mère, 105–6, 114,
214n22
Juliette Gleizes au manometer, 214n30
Portrait d’une jeune fille américaine
dans ‘état de nudité, 106–8
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240 Index
Picasso, Pablo, 48, 49, 50, 51, 54, 126,
129, 135
Pizer, Donald, 120
Plumb, Cheryl, J., 166
Poe, Edgar Allan, 140
Poggiolo, Renato, 5
pogroms, 178, 190
Pollock, Griselda, 123
popular culture, 8, 15, 49, 87, 91, 94,
98, 102, 114, 126, 128, 164, 174,
213n4
poststructuralism, 7, 8, 12, 16, 17, 157
potentia, 75
Pound, Ezra, 3, 5, 7, 11, 22, 23, 28, 59,
60, 67, 72–4, 84, 85, 119, 120,
121, 123, 127, 130, 133, 138, 143,
183, 186, 188, 198
Pound, Ezra, works by:
Cantos, 108, 110, 183
Homage to Sextus Propertius, 72
‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, 73–4
‘Translator’s Postscript to Remy de
Gourmont’s The Natural
Philosophy of Love’, 74
Protocols of the Learned Elders of
Zion, 178, 194
Provincetown Players, 34, 92
psychoanalysis, 18, 19, 31, 40, 64, 65,
66–7, 74–5, 87, 111, 157, 164
Rabin, Jessica, 201
Rado, Lisa, 10
Rainey, Lawrence, 7, 119, 123
Rascoe, Burton, 126
Ray, Man, 24, 85, 104, 105, 113, 120,
128, 129, 130, 143
Homme: Femme, 105
Catherine Barometer, 214–15n30
real, the, 12, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22,
23, 32, 49, 51, 105, 150, 158, 160,
174, 185, 187, 190
Reed, John, 35, 41
Red Head Priming Plug, 107
Rhoades, Katherine Nash, 113, 114
Rhys, Jean, Good Morning Midnight,
148
Richardson, Dorothy, 124, 184
Rifkin, Adrian, 121–2
Roberts, Andrew, 122
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Roché, Henri Pierre, 101
Roche, Juliette, 24, 113, 115 (see also
214n30)
Rodker, John, 184–5, 186–7, 196
Rogue, 41, 54, 60, 95, 96, 97, 108,
Rosenberg, Isaac, 67, 70, 184–6, 187,
197
Ruddick, Lisa, 52, 157
Russo, Mary, 153–4, 154,
155, 156
Sanger, Margaret, 43
Sassoon, Siegfried, 67, 70
Sawelson- Gorse, Naomi, 113
schizoanalysis, 19–20, 75,
schizophrenia, 31, 208
Schmitz, Neil, 204
Schreber, Daniel Paul, 207–8
Scott, Bonnie Kime, 7, 166, 168
Semitic discourse, 178, 180, 184, 188,
192, 193, 194, 195, 180, 217n2
sexuality, 1, 3, 5, 8, 28, 31, 53, 65, 75,
87, 102, 104, 110, 166, 168
shell-shock, 64–6, 70
Sherry, Vincent, 59, 60, 61, 67, 73
spectacle, 9, 25, 36, 37, 89, 91, 92,
93–4, 117, 120, 122, 148, 151,
165, 174–5
Spender, Stephen, 4, 5
Stallybrass, Peter and White, Allon,
153, 154
Steiglitz, Alfred, 34, 35, 50, 85, 101,
113, 114, 130
Stein, Gertrude, 1–4, 5, 27–8, 48–55,
80–84, 131, 132–6, 157–64,
199–206, 208, 209
and America, 50, 53–4, 126, 199
automatic writing by, 21
Barnes, Djuna, on, 192
and becoming-animal, 161–3
continuous present, 51, 55
and Criterion, 163–4
and cubism, 49, 51
Davidson, Jo, sculpture of, 130, 131
and domestic sphere, 149, 158, 160,
202
and Duchamp, Marcel, 48
and écriture feminine, 6, 28
and fashion, 130
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and fetish, 164
and First World War, 57–8, 59, 67,
80–2, 84
friendship with Loy, 1, 41
friendship with Picasso, 48, 135
on genius, 24, 118, 126, 132–6,
139–40, 148
and grotesque body, 156, 160, 161
Hemingway, Ernest, on, 157
and incestuous father, 52–3
and Italian Futurists, 48
and James, Henry, 51
and Jewishness, 25, 28, 178, 188,
199–206
at John Hopkins School of
Medicine, 49
on lesbian sex, 28, 80, 159, 162, 206
Loy, Mina, writing on, 136–9
and nouns, 158, 204
oral-anal, 25, 157–8
in Paris, 23, 48, 80, 126, 129–30,
199
and pet-names, 83, 159
and Picabia, Francis, 48
plays by, 56
portrait of, by Picasso, 48, 129
portraits (verbal) by, 50, 53–4, 56,
102
at Radcliffe, 49, 200
repetition, use of, 51–2, 53, 82, 102,
203
Rodker, John, on, 186
in Spain, 48, 80
and Toklas, Alice B. 23, 48, 49, 80,
126, 149, 159, 199
and Weininger, Otto, 133, 200
and Yiddish, 201–3, 218n23
Stein, Gertrude, works by:
‘Ada’, 53, 157
As a Wife Has a Cow, 162–4
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,
1, 48, 119, 126, 132, 13, 134,
163, 204
‘Aux Galaries Lafayette’, 54
Everybody’s Autobiography, 134, 199
Geography and Plays, 50
‘Henri Matisse’, 50, 54
‘IIIIIIIIII’, 54
‘Letters and Parcels and Wool’, 83–4
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241
Lifting Belly, 24, 80–3, 84, 159
The Making of Americans, 1, 15, 23,
41, 50, 51, 52, 53, 56, 132–3,
157, 200–1, 203
‘M. Vollard et Cèzanne’, 54
‘The Modern Jew Who Has Given
Up the Faith of His Fathers Can
Reasonably and Consistently
Believe in Isolation’, 200, 201
‘Miss Furr and Miss Skeene’, 143
‘Mrs Th—–y’, 54
‘Pablo Picasso’, 50, 54
‘Painted Lace’, 57–8, 67
‘Patriarchal Poetry’, 204–6
‘Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa
Curonia’, 41, 50, 54–5, 158
‘Preciosilla’, 163
QED, 200
‘The Reverie of the Zionist’, 203
Stanzas in Meditation, 204
‘Susie Asado’, 163
‘Sweet tail. Gypsies’, 136
Tender Buttons, 23, 28, 49, 148,
157–61, 164
Three Lives, 23, 50–1
Wars I Have Seen, 199
‘Yet Dish’, 202–3
Stein, Leo, 41, 48, 49,192
Stella, Joseph, 101, 116
Battle of Lights, Coney Island, 101
Stevens, Francis, 42, 97
Stevenson, Sheryl, 166
Stopes, Marie, 43
stratification, 18, 19, 24, 66, 74, 80,
88, 99, 102, 104, 159, 162, 166,
167, 169, 189, 195, 198
subjectification, 18, 24, 63, 66, 67, 71,
120, 125, 139, 149, 154, 161, 177,
186, 192, 195, 208
subjectivity, 5, 7, 16, 18, 19, 22, 31,
38, 39, 46, 74, 75, 80, 86, 93, 99,
113, 120, 154, 168, 190, 195
Sue, Eugène, The Wandering Jew, 192
suffragettes, 37
Sunday, Billy, 94, 102,
symbolic capital, 123, 126, 134, 139,
140, 153
Symbolism, 2, 28, 34
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242 Index
291, 35, 105, 107, 114
Tate, Trudi, 7, 61–2, 63, 66–7
Taylor, Charles (Taylorism), 32
technology, 31, 34, 42, 66, 68, 69, 87,
88, 93, 98, 101, 105, 110–13, 115,
150, 151, 156, 165
territorialisation, 18, 19, 32, 104, 121,
125, 135, 149, 162, 181, 182, 191,
204, 205
Tice, Clara, 24, 97–8, 101, 102,
108–10, 113, 114
Virgins Minus Verse, 108–10
‘Who’s Who in Manhattan’, 97–8
Todd, Ellen Wiley, 88
Toklas, Alice B, 23, 41, 48, 49, 84, 133,
159, 199
Transatlantic Review, 50, 136
Twitchell-Wass, Jeffry, 80
typewriter, 110–11
Tzara, Tristran, 143
unconscious, the, 18, 75, 153
Van Vechten, Carl, 33, 41, 48, 76, 95,
102, 130, 136
Vanity Fair, 60, 91, 97, 98, 101, 127,
143, 144, 146
Verdenal, Jean, 72
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, The Future Eve,
111–12
virginity, 43, 79, 108–10, 116, 173
Vogue, 119, 130
March2007
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Wagner-Martin, Linda, 199
Warner, Marina, 125
Watson, Steven, 139
Weininger, Otto, 133, 136,
191, 200
West, Rebecca, 65
Wharton, Edith, 127
Who’s Who in New York’s Bohemia’,
91
wild realism, 17
Wilde, Oscar, 94, 95, 127
Will, Barbara, 133, 134
Williams, Raymond, 120
Williams, William Carlos, 5, 21, 28,
113, 148, 198, 216n18
Wilson, Elizabeth, 124
Winkiel, Laura, 165, 174
Winter, Jay, 59–60, 61
Wolff, Janet, 121, 124
Wood, Beatrice, 24, 101, 111,
113, 114,
Woolf, Virginia, 5, 30, 59, 60, 61, 151
Yealland, Lewis, 64
‘Yellow journalism’, 34, 90, 93, 103
Yiddish, 180–1, 184, 193, 198,
199, 201–4
Zabel, Barbara, 104, 105
Zayas, Marius de, 114
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