Metropolis modernism

Cultures of Modernism: Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, and Else Lasker-Schuler

by Cristanne Miller

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. 288 pages

In Cultures of Modernism Cristanne Miller brings together three poets with widely divergent backgrounds and strikingly different styles who nevertheless have several key things in common: they were women, they wrote unconventional poetry, and they lived in major Western cities in the first half of the twentieth century. Miller calls for a comparative approach that allows us to see how family and community ties, educational opportunities, religious affiliations, and contemporary politics shaped each writer's career. Or as she puts it:

    This book looks at particular modernist writers in the context of
    national and local structures to argue that location significantly
    inflected modernist women's performances of subjectivity, gender,
    race, and religion in their texts and in their lives by making
    different subject categories available to them and enabling or
    preventing particular modes of expression. (2)

The book displays Miller's characteristic ability to plumb deep into poetry while simultaneously probing around in history, producing an argument of remarkable depth, breadth, and subtlety.

In an epigraph on the back cover, Marjorie Perloff praises Cultures of Modernism as an "original study of a 'different' modernism in poetry--namely the modernism of women poets." Miller's work is original, however, not because she identifies a distinctively female modernism but because she models an approach that applies to all modernisms precisely because of its comparative framework and its emphasis on historical and geographical specificity. Although Miller chooses to focus on three women poets, she is perhaps less interested in what they have in common than in what distinguishes them--the particulars of time and place that both enabled and fettered them as poets.

Location, she asserts, is crucial to understanding the role of gender, not only in the lives and writings of these poets but also in current constructions of modernism. The cities in which these writers lived and wrote influenced the gender codes and conventions they encountered: Moore in New York; Loy in London, Paris, Florence, and New York; and Lasker-Schuler in Berlin. The freedoms and opportunities available to women in the early twentieth century differed wildly, even among these Western metropolises, resulting in different kinds of resources and negotiations for each writer. Moore earned a degree at Bryn Mawr College and continued to be supported by networks of women throughout her life. Loy went to art school in Paris but experienced little sense of community beyond the private salons hosted by Mabel Dodge in Italy and Louise and Walter Conrad Arensberg in New York. Lasker-Schuler had the least access to formal education but found a stimulating community in the public, male-dominated cafe culture of Berlin. Miller convincingly shows how their environments influenced their respective poetics and feminisms. She also makes a persuasive case for the significance of place and gender in shaping our paradigms for modernism:

    modernist cultures take distinctive and distinctively gendered forms
    from one place to another, and ... to the degree that one recognizes
    women as significantly engaged in its writing and art, modernism
    appears less conservative, antithetical to religion, and divorced
    from personal life constructions than it has been portrayed. (2)

Of course, environment influences any writer and, as Miller admits, "men's lives were also framed by access to education, sexuality, and degrees of marginalization from middle-class, racial, and ethnic norms." Nevertheless, the limitations of place had more pronounced effect on women in the earlier twentieth century because the conditions were so much more variable for them (4-5). Indeed, location plays a defining role in fixing gender limits, as Moore, Loy, and Lasker-Schuler well recognized. Their writings explore the social and linguistic connections between space, place, and gender.

    In the evening they looked out of their two windows
    Miovanni out of his library window
    Gina from the kitchen window
    From among his pots and pans (Loy 36)

In this excerpt from her satirical 1917 poem "The Effectual Marriage," Loy uses deadpan humor to expose the limits of the gender divide--the unequal divisions power and ownership enforced by architecture and marriage. In an early draft of her 1923 poem "Marriage," Moore conveys a similar disdain for conventional gender frames: "This division into masculine and feminine compartments of achievement will not do" (qtd. in Stapleton 39). Lasker-Schuler likewise rejects gender categories in a 1902 poem "My Drama," proclaiming: "I don't believe any longer in Woman and Man" (84). (1) Of the three poets, Miller explains, Lasker-Schuler is the least inclined to anchor her poetry in concrete, local particulars, preferring mythic and metaphorical effusions. But even the evasion of such particulars in her poetry communicates an awareness of the correspondence between gender restrictions and physical confines. "Flight from the World" is a poem that, according to Miller, "expresses the speaker's desire to flee all restrictive categories": "I want to go into boundlessness / Back to me" (135). Complaining of suffocation, the speaker longs "to pull threads around me" and "To escape / Mine-wards!" To find herself, then, is to escape bounded enclosures and trappings; authentic selfhood is conceived as a condition of being outside, unhoused, and unclothed. Miller argues that "the coinage 'Meinwarts' [Mine-wards], with its echo of Heimwarts, or homewards, implies both the inadequacy and the flexibility of standard German, even for alienated speakers" (136). The neologism also implies the possibility of a new form of I--selfhood as an unconventional, unbounded home, freed from the gender boxes that delimit men and women in "their two windows."