“Something taking shape / Something that has a new name”: Redefinition of Sexual Difference as a Transformative Power in Mina Loy’s and H. D.’s Modernist Poems

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper explores how and Mina Loy’s and H. D.’s rhetorical experiments, which are analogous to the features of their feminine syntax, consequently revise the dominant social grammar in which woman is not defined as a ‘speaking’ and ‘desiring’ subject. Many avant-garde women poets from the 1910s through 1950s lived in the modernist society where male voices were often deemed universal and this mono-gendered literary world allowed no language to secure Loy’s and H. D.’s voices and experiences as women. Loy and H. D. shared the acute sense of loss and split derived from the fellow modernists’ ontological presumption on women and felt the consequent deprivation of language under the patriarchal gaze. In order to resuscitate the unnameable female experiences and inscribe “[s]omething taking shape / Something that has a new name” in their poetic languages, H. D. epitomizes her characters’ multiple and transforming identities by superimposing the variant myths in such a way that there can no longer be any question of which represents the original female image and experience. Loy also attempts to represent the abjected, anomalous, and marginalized female body and its experiences through such images of grotesque and visceral bodily fluids and orifices. This paper investigates how these modernist poets rearticulated what are the ways of living that count as femaleness and what qualifies as a female body in the early twentieth century, while at the same time keeping such ideas and terms at a cautious distance from the symbolic and its orderly proceedings.