The term “modern” in everyday language means contemporary, new, the latest thing. When we talk about “Modernism” term, modernism is a literary and cultural international movement which flourished in the first decades of the 20th century. It was an intellectual movement and a change that defined itself as the latest thing. During Modernism it seemed like religion and culture fell apart. In modernism people tried to reject tradition and tried new things. This period was marked by large technological advances such as invention of new building material, cars, speed and locomotion. Although modernism brought up innovative and experimental changes, this time period witnessed the First World War and the Great Depression. Those events led people to feel a sense of loss and uncertainty. When it comes to literature, experimentation with the form was another defining characteristic of modernism is not a term that can be described in single term. It may be applied both to the content and to the form of a work, or to either in isolation. It reflects a sense of cultural crisis which was both, exciting and scary. Modernism opened up a whole new pallet of human possibilities at the same time as putting into question any previously accepted means of grounding and evaluating new ideas. “Modernism is marked by experimentation, particularly manipulation of form, and by the realization that knowledge is not absolute.” (Ciaffaroni, 2009).
While New York City is in the middle of a heat wave, the residents of one building beat the heat by sitting on the building’s stoop and catching up on gossip. Emma Jones, the building’s resident main gossiper, is happy to make sure everyone knows what Anna Murant has been up to. Anna, married to Frank, has been not-too-discreetly carrying on an affair with Steve Sankey, her married milkman. Everyone knows what has been going on with Anna and Steve, but Frank is only suspicious at this point.
Meanwhile, Anna’s daughter Rose, like her mother, longs for something more satisfying out of life. She has a job, but has to put up with constant advances from her boss, who wants to turn her into a kept woman. However, Rose doesn’t want to take the easy way out. Rose’s best friend is her neighbor, Sam who is in love with her, even though she doesn’t feel the same way about him. He’s studying to become a lawyer, but would gladly throw everything aside for the chance to be with Rose. When Frank leaves town on business, of course Steve goes to see Anna. But when Frank returns unexpectedly, the neighbors are powerless to stop the confrontation they know is about to happen. When Frank finds Anna and Steve together, he shoots and kills both of them and runs away. The police get to work investigating the crime while the neighborhood is excited by the scandal.
Movies set during heat waves tend to fascinate me because they often seem to show how the heat can bring out the worst in people. . Street Scene is definitely an early example of that theme. At the highest, the gossip about Anna’s affair with Steve, we see the residents of this neighborhood reveal their prejudices and other negative traits. The Street Scene is more of a character study than it is about the affair between Anna and Steven. The entire play takes place on a street in New York when neighbors actually talked to each other and sat on their stoops in an attempt to obtain the most recent gossip. The neighborhood contains a wide range of immigrants and people who are fairly comfortable discussing their own religious biases and prejudices. No one seems to have much money, but it also doesn't seem to matter very much.This play involving a mix of ethnic and social diversity on a New York tenement street, explores some of the best and worst aspects of human nature.
Throughout Street Scene, Rice underscores how oppressive the machine of modern urban life is. (The machines here are New York City, life in the tenement building, and the kind of jobs held by these lower middle class people.) The play is set on a hot day in June and many of the characters suffer from the heat.
American modernism benefited from the diversity of immigrant cultures. Artists were inspired by African, Caribbean, Asian and European folk cultures and embedded these exotic styles in their works.
The Modernist American movement is a reflection of American life in the 20th century. In this quickly industrializing world and fast pace of life, it is easy for the individual to be swallowed up by the great size of things; left wandering, lack of purpose. Social boundaries in race, class, sex, wealth, and religion are all being challenged. As the social structure is challenged by new incoming views the bounds of traditional standards and social structure dissolve and a loss of identity is all that remains; translating later into isolation, alienation, and an overall feeling of separateness from any kind of “whole”. The unity of a war rallied country was dying, along with it the illusion of the pleasantries it sold to its soldiers and people. The world was left spiritually empty.
The middle class worker falls into a distinctly unnoticeable position, a cog much too small to hope to find recognition in much greater machine. Citizens were overcome with their own futility. Youths dreams shatter with failure and a disillusioning disappointment in recognition of limit and loss. The lives of the disillusioned and outcasts become more focal. Ability to define self through hard work and resourcefulness, to create your own vision of yourself without the help of traditional means becomes prized. Some authors endorse this, while other, such as Fitzgerald, challenge how alluring but destructively false the values of the privileged can be.
Modernist America had to find common ground in a world no longer unified in belief. The unity found lay in the common ground of the shared consciousness within all human experience. The importance of the individual is emphasized; the truly limited nature of the human experience forms a bond across all bridges of race, class, sex, wealth, or religion. Society, in this way, found shared meaning, even in disarray.
Some see modernism in the tradition of 19th century aestheticism and the "art for art's sake" movement. Clement Greenberg argues that modernist art excludes "anything outside itself". Others see modernist art, for example in blues and jazz music, as a medium for emotions and moods and many works dealt with contemporary issues, like feminism and city life. Some artists and theoreticians even added a political dimension to American modernism.
American modernist design and architecture enabled people to lead a modern life. Work and family life changed radically and rapidly due to the economic upswing during the 1920s. In the U.S. the car became popular and affordable for many, leisure time and entertainment gained importance and the job market opened up for women. In order to make life more efficient, designers and architects aimed at the simplification of housework.
The blistering heat and unrelenting humidity of a hot summer day drive the tenants of a four story walk-up out in front of the house, where they sit on the stoop and gossip about one another with wanton relish. Others hang out the window, watching the cars drive by on the busy, two way street, while the occasional passing of the el can be heard coming down the tracks at the end of the block.
Some of the characters found in this neighborhood include a Jewish Bolshevist and his family, a Norwegian couple, an Italian-German couple, an Irish couple and non-immigrant Americans, all thrown together into the 'great melting pot,' who socialize, argue, commit adulterous indiscretions, and interact on all levels during a couple of hot summer days in New York City.
Ethnic and Religious Intolerance
In Street Scene, many of the residents of the crowded tenement building express beliefs that are prejudiced and intolerant of their neighbors and others. Sitting on the brownstone’s front stoop, they deride the way those different from themselves conduct their lives. For example, in the first moments of the play, Mrs. Jones, one of the nonimmigrant residents of the building, says ‘‘What them foreigners don’t know about bringin’ up babies would fill a book’’ about Mrs. Olsen. Mrs. Olsen is an immigrant from Scandinavia. Mrs. Jones makes this statement to Mrs. Fiorentino, a German immigrant who is married to an Italian immigrant. Mrs. Fiorentino is slightly offended by the implication. Mrs. Jones also expresses intolerant beliefs about most everyone in the play.
One of the more unpopular resident families in the tenement is the Kaplans. Elderly father Abraham, his daughter Shirley and son Sam are disliked by many of their neighbors for being Jewish as well as for holding radical political beliefs. Abraham Kaplan is a socialist who believes the capitalist economic system exploits workers. Many residents are intolerant of Mr. Kaplan and his beliefs, and blame Jewish people for various problems in their world. Similarly, most residents do not approve of the potential relationship between Sam Kaplan and Rose Maurrant. They tell Rose and her parents that they would never let their daughter become involved with someone who is Jewish. By depicting these kinds of prejudices and situations, Rice depicts the diversity of New York City’s populace and their beliefs. Not every aspect is positive.
Individual versus Machine
Throughout Street Scene, Rice underscores how oppressive the machine of modern urban life is. (The machines here are New York City, life in the tenement building, and the kind of jobs held by these lower middle class people.) The play is set on a hot day in June and many of the characters suffer from the heat. Because the...
The most vicious of the gossips is played by Beulah Bondi, a hag of a woman who looks much older than her years. Her favorite target is the very lonely, and very stunning Mrs. Maurrant, wonderfully played by Estelle Taylor, who is constantly bullied by her husband, played by David Landau. Mrs. Maurrant is so lovely, she looks more like an older sister to Rose, portrayed nicely by Sylvia Sidney, instead of her mother. Mrs. Maurrant is so desperate for some kindness and attention, that her fondness for the milkman is easily discerned by her jackal-like neighbors. The moment she's out of sight, Beulah Bondi's character starts passing judgment with a vengeance, and gets the other neighbors all stirred up in the process. To make matter's worse, Bondi and the others always act so peculiar every time Mr. Maurrant passes by, that he soon grasps the fact that they think his wife is having an affair with the milkman.
Although the building is filled with people of different nationalities and creeds, all displaying intolerance of others in one way or another, the main theme of the film is the belief that malicious gossip, unforgiving and relenting, is as deadly as any weapon, and probably more so. At least a gun can shoot a person dead in a moment, but cruel and relentless gossip cuts at the heart and soul without mercy. Mrs. Maurrant is chided, ridiculed, humiliated, and made fun of at every turn, while she bravely tries to be friendly and understanding to everyone else. Street Scene is well written and wonderfully acted by all the players, but it's a creaky film with almost no movement. The whole movie is shot on the front stoop of the house, and such a static film may be difficult for some to take. But, it is a touching story that will make some question the usual rules regarding morality and fidelity. Even Mr. Murrant becomes the victim of the gossip, as he explains to his daughter Rose, "It was all the talk that was driving me crazy."
A movement dated from roughly 1900-1950. In short, modernism is about changes--changes in society and changes in literary form. Modernist literature represents the change a traditional society experiences as it becomes modern, a transformation that may be painful. In this time period, Americans witnessed the devastating effects of World War I, Black Friday and the subsequent stock market crash, the Great Depression, and World War II, and many people were disillusioned. Also in this time period came Darwin's theory of evolution, challenging traditional ideas about religion; Karl Marx's theories on communism, challenging the current idea of government; and Sigmund Freud's theory of the unconscious mind, challenging traditional ideas about humanity. Many modernist writers reflect this disillusionment and confusion by questioning traditional values and beliefs and/or portraying the failure of the American Dream. As the editors of your textbook point out, modernism is "an experience of loss" (Baym et al, 2013, p. 1847). This loss and uncertainty is sometimes reflected in literature that might end without a true resolution, echoing the loss many felt in their lives. The traditional "happy ending" is certainly not a staple in modernist literature.
Modernism is a philosophical movement that, along with cultural trends and changes, arose from wide-scale and far-reaching transformations in Western society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Among the factors that shaped Modernism were the development of modern industrial societies and the rapid growth of cities, followed then by the horror of World War I. Modernism also rejected the certainty of Enlightenment thinking, and many modernists rejected religious belief.[2][3]
Modernism, in general, includes the activities and creations of those who felt the traditional forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, philosophy, social organization, activities of daily life, and even the sciences, were becoming ill-fitted to their tasks and outdated in the new economic, social, and political environment of an emerging fully industrialized world. The poet Ezra Pound's 1934 injunction to "Make it new!" was the touchstone of the movement's approach towards what it saw as the now obsolete culture of the past. In this spirit, its innovations, like the stream-of-consciousness novel, atonal (or pantonal) and twelve-tone music, divisionist painting and abstract art, all had precursors in the 19th century.
A notable characteristic of Modernism is self-consciousness, which often led to experiments with form, along with the use of techniques that drew attention to the processes and materials used in creating a painting, poem, building, etc.[4] Modernism explicitly rejected the ideology of realism[5][6][7] and makes use of the works of the past by the employment of reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision and parody.[8][9][10]
Some commentators define Modernism as a mode of thinking—one or more philosophically defined characteristics, like self-consciousness or self-reference, that run across all the novelties in the arts and the disciplines.[11] More common, especially in the West, are those who see it as a socially progressive trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve and reshape their environment with the aid of practical experimentation, scientific knowledge, or technology.[12] From this perspective, Modernism encouraged the re-examination of every aspect of existence, from commerce to philosophy, with the goal of finding that which was 'holding back' progress, and replacing it with new ways of reaching the same end. Others focus on Modernism as an aesthetic introspection. This facilitates consideration of specific reactions to the use of technology in the First World War, and anti-technological and nihilistic aspects of the works of diverse thinkers and artists spanning the period from Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) to Samuel Beckett (1906–1989).[13]
The Modernist Period in English Literature occupied the years from shortly after the beginning of the twentieth century through roughly 1965. In broad terms, the period was marked by sudden and unexpected breaks with traditional ways of viewing and interacting with the world. Experimentation and individualism became virtues, where in the past they were often heartily discouraged. Modernism was set in motion, in one sense, through a series of cultural shocks. The first of these great shocks was the Great War, which ravaged Europe from 1914 through 1918, known now as World War One. At the time, this “War to End All Wars” was looked upon with such ghastly horror that many people simply could not imagine what the world seemed to be plunging towards. The first hints of that particular way of thinking called Modernism stretch back into the nineteenth century. As literary periods go, Modernism displays a relatively strong sense of cohesion and similarity across genres and locales. Furthermore, writers who adopted the Modern point of view often did so quite deliberately and self-consciously. Indeed, a central preoccupation of Modernism is with the inner self and consciousness. In contrast to the Romantic world view, the Modernist cares rather little for Nature, Being, or the overarching structures of history. Instead of progress and growth, the Modernist intelligentsia sees decay and a growing alienation of the individual. The machinery of modern society is perceived as impersonal, capitalist, and antagonistic to the artistic impulse. War most certainly had a great deal of influence on such ways of approaching the world. Two World Wars in the span of a generation effectively shell-shocked all of Western civilization.
In its genesis, the Modernist Period in English literature was first and foremost a visceral reaction against the Victorian culture and aesthetic, which had prevailed for most of the nineteenth century. Indeed, a break with traditions is one of the fundamental constants of the Modernist stance. Intellectuals and artists at the turn of the twentieth century believed the previous generation’s way of doing things was a cultural dead end. They could foresee that world events were spiraling into unknown territory. The stability and quietude of Victorian civilization were rapidly becoming a thing of the past. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria was essentially the triggering event of the First World War, a conflict which swept away all preconceived notions about the nature of so-called modern warfare.
In the world of art, generally speaking, Modernism was the beginning of the distinction between “high” art and “low” art. The educational reforms of the Victorian Age had led to a rapid increase in literacy rates, and therefore a greater demand for literature or all sorts. A popular press quickly developed to supply that demand. The sophisticated literati looked upon this new popular literature with scorn. Writers who refused to bow to the popular tastes found themselves in a state of alienation from the mainstream of society. To some extent, this alienation fed into the stereotype of the aloof artist, producing nothing of commercial value for the market. It’s worth mentioning that this alienation worked both ways, as the reading public by and large turned their backs on many “elitist” artists. The academic world became something of a refuge for disaffected artists, as they could rub elbows with fellow disenfranchised intellectuals. Still, the most effective poets and novelists did manage to make profound statements that were absorbed by the whole of society and not just the writer’s inner circles. In the later years of the Modernist period, a form of populism returned to the literary mainstream, as regionalism and identity politics became significant influences on the purpose and direction of artistic endeavor.
The nineteenth century, like the several centuries before it, was a time of privilege for wealthy Caucasian males. Women, minorities, and the poor were marginalized to the point of utter silence and inconsequence. The twentieth century witnessed the beginnings of a new paradigm between first the sexes, and later between different cultural groups. Class distinction remains arguably the most difficult bridge to cross in terms of forming a truly equitable society. Some would argue that class has become a euphemism for race, but that’s another discussion. The point is that as the twentieth century moved forward, a greater variety of literary voices won the struggle to be heard. What had so recently been inconceivable was steadily becoming a reality. African-Americans took part in the Harlem Renaissance, with the likes of Langston Hughes at the forefront of a vibrant new idiom in American poetry. Women like Hilda Doolittle and Amy Lowell became leaders of the Imagist movement. None of this is to suggest that racism and sexism had been completely left behind in the art world. Perhaps such blemishes can never be fully erased, but the strides that were taken in the twentieth century were remarkable by any measure.
In Modernist literature, it was the poets who took fullest advantage of the new spirit of the times, and stretched the possibilities of their craft to lengths not previously imagined. In general, there was a disdain for most of the literary production of the last century. The exceptions to this disdain were the French Symbolist poets like Charles Beaudelaire, and the work of Irishman Gerard Manley Hopkins. The French Symbolists were admired for the sophistication of their imagery. In comparison to much of what was produced in England and America, the French were ahead of their time. They were similarly unafraid to delve into subject matter that had usually been taboo for such a refined art form. Hopkins, for his part, brought a fresh way to look at rhythm and word usage. He more or less invented his own poetic rhythms, just as he coined his own words for things which had, for him, no suitable descriptor. Hopkins had no formal training in poetry, and he never published in his lifetime. This model – the self-taught artist-hermit who has no desire for public adulation – would become synonymous with the poet in the modern age. This stereotype continues unrivaled to this day, despite the fact that the most accomplished poets of the Modern period were far from recluses. Even though alienation was a nearly universal experience for Modernist poets, it was impossible to escape some level of engagement with the world at large. Even if this engagement was mediated through the poetry, the relationship that poets had with their world was very real, and very much revealing of the state of things in the early twentieth century.
Leading up to the First World War, Imagist poetry was dominating the scene, and sweeping previous aesthetic points of view under the rug. The Imagists, among them Ezra Pound, sought to boil language down to its absolute essence. They wanted poetry to concentrate entirely upon “the thing itself,” in the words of critic-poet T. E. Hulme. To achieve that effect required minimalist language, a lessening of structural rules and a kind of directness that Victorian and Romantic poetry seriously lacked. Dreaminess or Pastoral poetry were utterly abandoned in favor of this new, cold, some might say mechanized poetics. Imagist poetry was almost always short, unrhymed, and noticeably sparse in terms of adjectives and adverbs. At some points, the line between poetry and natural language became blurred. This was a sharp departure from the ornamental, verbose style of the Victorian era. Gone also were the preoccupations with beauty and nature. Potential subjects for poetry were now limitless, and poets took full advantage of this new freedom.
No Modernist poet has garnered more praise and attention than Thomas Stearns Eliot. Born in Missouri, T. S. Eliot would eventually settle in England, where he would produce some of the greatest poetry and criticism of the last century. Eliot picked up where the Imagists left off, while adding some of his own peculiar aesthetics to the mix. His principal contribution to twentieth century verse was a return to highly intellectual, allusive poetry. He looked backwards for inspiration, but he was not nostalgic or romantic about the past. Eliot’s productions were entirely in the modern style, even if his blueprints were seventeenth century metaphysical poets. One of the distinguishing characteristics of Eliot’s work is the manner in which he seamlessly moves from very high, formal verse into a more conversational and easy style. Yet even when his poetic voice sounds very colloquial, there is a current underneath, which hides secondary meanings. It is this layering of meanings and contrasting of styles that mark Modernist poetry in general and T. S. Eliot in particular. It is no overstatement to say that Eliot was the pioneer of the ironic mode in poetry; that is, deceptive appearances hiding difficult truths.
In American Literature, the group of writers and thinkers known as the Lost Generation has become synonymous with Modernism. In the wake of the First World War, several American artists chose to live abroad as they pursued their creative impulses. These included the intellectual Gertrude Stein, the novelists Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the painter Waldo Pierce, among others. The term itself refers to the spiritual and existential hangover left by four years of unimaginably destructive warfare. The artists of the Lost Generation struggled to find some meaning in the world in the wake of chaos. As with much of Modernist literature, this was achieved by turning the mind’s eye inward and attempting to record the workings of consciousness. For Hemingway, this meant the abandonment of all ornamental language. His novels are famous for their extremely spare, blunt, simple sentences and emotions that play out right on the surface of things. There is an irony to this bluntness, however, as his characters often have hidden agendas, hidden sometimes even from themselves, which serve to guide their actions. The Lost Generation, like other “High Modernists,” gave up on the idea that anything was truly knowable. All truth became relative, conditional, and in flux. The War demonstrated that no guiding spirit rules the events of the world, and that absolute destruction was kept in check by only the tiniest of margins.
The novel was by no means immune from the self-conscious, reflective impulses of the new century. Modernism introduced a new kind of narration to the novel, one that would fundamentally change the entire essence of novel writing. The “unreliable” narrator supplanted the omniscient, trustworthy narrator of preceding centuries, and readers were forced to question even the most basic assumptions about how the novel should operate. James Joyce’s Ulysses is the prime example of a novel whose events are really the happenings of the mind, the goal of which is to translate as well as possible the strange pathways of human consciousness. A whole new perspective came into being known as “stream of consciousness.” Rather than looking out into the world, the great novelists of the early twentieth century surveyed the inner space of the human mind. At the same time, the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud had come into mainstream acceptance. These two forces worked together to alter people’s basic understanding of what constituted truth and reality.
Experimentation with genre and form was yet another defining characteristic of Modernist literature. Perhaps the most representative example of this experimental mode is T. S. Eliot’s long poem The Waste Land. Literary critics often single out The Waste Land as the definitive sample of Modernist literature. In it, one is confronted by biblical-sounding verse forms, quasi-conversational interludes, dense and frequent references which frustrate even the most well-read readers, and sections that resemble prose more than poetry. At the same time, Eliot fully displays all the conventions which one expects in Modernist literature. There is the occupation with self and inwardness, the loss of traditional structures to buttress the ego against shocking realities, and a fluid nature to truth and knowledge.
The cynicism and alienation of the first flowering of Modernist literature could not persist. By mid-century, indeed by the Second World War, there was already a strong reaction against the pretentions of the Moderns. Artists of this newer generation pursued a more democratic, pluralistic mode for poetry and the novel. There was optimism for the first time in a long time. Commercialism, publicity, and the popular audience were finally embraced, not shunned. Alienation became boring. True, the influence of Modernist literature continues to be quite astonishing. The Modern poet-critics changed the way people think about artists and creative pursuits. The Modern novelists changed the way many people perceive truth and reality. These changes are indeed profound, and cannot easily be replaced by new schemas.
Feminist activism had intensified in England at the beginning of the 20th century. Many women campaigned for equality rights. One feminist in particular though, went beyond the demands of equality to write the “Feminist Manifesto.” In this manifesto, the star poet and writer, Mina Loy, “tries to harness for feminism the radicalism and individualism of the avant-garde, calling for a complete revolution of gender relations.” Meaning she wanted to channel new ways of thinking for the radical, feminist, individual in regards to gender differences. In continuation, “She abandons the suffragette movement’s central issue of equality and insists instead on an adversarial model of gender, claiming that women should not look to men for a standard of value but should find it within themselves” (“Mina”). Equality, the pursuit to be like the man, is not the goal. To redeem individual worth and elevate the self to a plateau, without regard of where the man is standing, is Loy’s goal and philosophy. It is necessary to recognize, though, that Loy’s “Feminsit Manifesto” was never published. It was sent in a letter in 1914 to a friend, Mabel Dodge, then eventually published after Loy’s death in 1982 (“Mina”). Despite the fact that this manifesto never met the public’s eye to inspire women to a new frame of thought and independence, I suggest that the ideals within it were able to reach other prominent women during this time anyway. Loy was not alone in her beliefs. In fact, women such as Martha Graham, Coco Chanel, and Maria Laurencin also displayed in their artistic creations the ideals that Mina Loy wrote. They pursued their passions with happiness as the end-in-mind, instead of equality to man. By narrowing their focus to a selfish rite of passage, they stand on their own, rarely compared to male predecessors or contemporaries.
A vibrant contributor to the Modernist movement, Mina Loy drafted her manifesto in response to F.T. Marinetti’s “Manifesto of Futurism.” Marinetti’s work focused on speed, aggression, war, and most importantly, the abandonment of traditional standards and institutions. In a mixed criticism and endorsement of these ideas, Loy wrote her “Feminist Manifesto,” a verbal cry of feminist strength and stupidity.
In it, Loy claims that rather than reform, the “only method [of upheaval] is absolute demolition.” She calls for a destruction of all psychological and social institutions that keep women in their current state of inequality. She calls for the abandonment of seeking definition in men, saying “seek within yourselves to find out what you are.” She also states that “women and men are enemies,” and also claiming that “The only point at which the interests of the sexes merge– is the sexual embrace.” This harsh redefinition seems radical (and harshly beautiful in some ways) to my 21st century, feminist self and this woman was writing in 1914! In some ways echoing the harshness and bleak starkness of Marinetti’s manifesto, Loy also says that the only way to equality is through the “unconditional surgical destruction of virginity through-out the female population at puberty” so as to put an end to the tendency for women (and men) to identify self-worth with sexuality.
She goes still further to say that every woman has the right and responsibility to maternity, saying “Every woman of superior intelligence should realize her race-responsibility, in producing children in adequate proportion to the unfit or degenerate members of her sex.” She also calls for the end of sentimentality and emotion in women, claiming that the only way to achieve equality is through “destroy[ing] in themselves, the desire to be loved.”
This entirely radical line of thinking is both thrilling and frightening. Hinting at eugenics and sex-oriented enmity, Loy seems to be championing some of the precepts I understand to be the basis of social inequality. However, she her ideas of sexual/emotional liberty and self-ownership as the basis of self-respect inspire a visceral excitement and appreciation that bridges the gap of a century. Extreme, a la Marinetti, and exciting, a la the feminist movement of 50 years later, Loy is both revoltingly radical and tenaciously progressive in her pronunciations. Put in the context of the Modernist movement, her abandonment of traditional institutions and her reorientation of values is consistent, and thus makes her less radical. However, she is entirely effective as an inspiration because of her use of the movement’s radicalism and redefinition.
Feminism, in its simplest form, is the belief that women have the same social and political rights as men. This is nothing more than suffrage, property ownership, education, and so on and so forth. Cheris Kramare, co-editor of the Rutledge International Encyclopedia of Women, defines it as the radical notion that women are people too. Unfortunately, the world of 'third wave' feminism is a bit more complicated than any dictionary can explain, though many philosophers and activists have tried.
Mina Loy, in her own FEMINIST MANIFESTO, actually rejects the notion that women and men are equal. She says, "...be brave and deny at the outset that pathetic clap-trap war cry, 'Woman is the equal of man.' She is not." Loy also claims it's all about a power struggle, and in order to gain the upper hand, women must desexualize themselves to reach a role of power - "woman must destroy in herself the desire to be loved." Although she recognizes that some characteristics are feminine (and others are more masculine), she believed these characteristics must be removed from the female experience. I have to ask, what is the point if we can never hope to reach any kind of equality? Though part of me wonders if that's really what she's getting at.
There's this theme throughout feminism of abandoning perceived feminine weaknesses. Mary Wollenstencraft, in her infamous "Vindication on the Rights of Women," preaches intellect and its power (considering most women in this time were not educated in the same subjects as men). However, as she persuades women to develop a strength of the mind and the body, she also views "soft phrases, susceptibility of the heart, and refinement of taste" as being synonymous with "epithets of weakness." This mirrors the stereotypical mindset of third wave feminism to defy tradition as you will, but those who don't are weak/anti-feminist and have somehow failed to reach their potential.
Second wave feminists took their desire for equality to a point of burning bras, chopping hair, and essentially reinforcing the idea that femininity is somehow not good enough. Frankly, this historical motif is ridiculous. The inherent strength of all women is easily seen through centuries of what Howard Zinn called 'intimate oppression' (I prefer intimate slavery), from the women who suffered through it in silence to those who challenged the traditional gender roles of their time. Looking through historical record, one thing is clear: feminism is not a 19th century invention! Women have an incredibly inherent strength inside of them, lying in wait until it is needed.
All women should take a leaf from French feminist philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir. In her 1949 book, The Second Sex, by breaking down and analyzing the detailed history of feminine oppression, she introduces a brand of feminism inundated with some good old existentialist philosophy. Womanhood can only be defined by the individual woman -- it means nothing special to be a woman until we, as individuals, bring meaning to the term through our personal experiences. One aspect I'm particularly fond of is her focus on women as 'the Other.' Unlike those before and even after her, de Beauvoir chastises women for considering perceived feminine traits or femininity itself as somehow weak or lacking. Sure, women and men are two categories for a reason, but there is nothing 'different' (she says different implies somehow abnormal) about being a woman. Everything about femininity is natural. In striving to emulate maleness as a substitute for normalcy, we betray ourselves.
Feminism in 21st century society, above all, should be an emphasis on choice. In bringing a unique and personal meaning to feminism means recognizing others' right to do the exact same thing. Every woman, not just in America or civilized countries, should be able to harness this special gift and create a positive meaning of their own womanhood. Sadly, there are women around the world who are stuck in a society which doesn't value them and leaves them no choice.
I could honestly rant forever about the injustices women face in foreign countries and even here at home. There is not enough space anywhere for all the words in my heart about feminism in general. All women should think of themselves as feminists, and all women should respect the choices of their peers in how they live their lives.
Me? To be honest, I'm not completely sure how it is I want to live my life. I do know for sure that regardless of where I am, what I'm doing, or who I become, I will always champion not only the rights of women where I live, but also around the world. Some have criticized me in my pursuit, and some have praised me, but no words will ever sway me from my fierce determination to see that all women have a voice.
